11 years in! Wedding photography
Eleven years is a strange number. Long enough that I have to sit still for a second before I can picture the first wedding we shot as Travis Photo. Short enough that I still get that niggle the night before, lying there running the timeline in my head like I've never done this. Jessica will tell you I still pack the bags twice.
We've been Manchester wedding photographers for eleven years. Husband and wife team, based in Worsley in Greater Manchester, with a studio in Walkden that started as an infinity wall I built myself and a slightly stubborn belief that this could actually work. God loves a trier.
How we got here
I used to teach at the University of Salford, raising my twin sons on my own, always with a DSLR hanging off me. Colleagues and students knew me as the one fiddling with a camera between everything else. Photography was the only creative outlet I could find time for, and I've had a camera with me for as long as I can remember. My mum used to photograph cars for Auto Trader in the 1980s. I'd go with her in the school holidays and sometimes she'd let me take the polaroids while she filled out the details. Not glamour. Showing up, getting the picture, going home.
Jessica believed in me as a photographer before I fully did. She's the one who gave me the shove to try this full time. Now we're married, with two sets of twins (five children in total), a crazy dog, and a portrait studio. The house is loud. The calendar is louder. Somehow that's the point of the whole thing.
I'm not going to dress eleven years up as a highlight reel. Some of it has been graft. Some of it has been standing in a car park in the wet, waiting for a gap in the weather, wondering if I packed the spare batteries. What's shit about this job, on the worst days, is that it matters so much you can feel it in your stomach. What's good about it is the same thing.
Family-centred, because we haven't got another setting
People talk about family-centred wedding photography like it's a look you can switch on. For us it's just how a day actually is. Kids under the table. Grandparents who need a chair and a minute. The quiet look between two people when nobody is performing for the camera. Same-sex weddings, big noisy ones, small ones, the ones where half the guests are in wellies. If it's a family, it's a family.
We photograph as a husband and wife team, and that's not a slogan. One of us can be in with the speeches while the other is down the corridor with a flower girl who has had enough. You get two people who already know how to work around children, because we live that every day. You also get two people who will tell you if the timeline is about to fall over, rather than smiling and hoping.
We've been featured in County Wedding Magazine and Your North West Wedding, which is a nice thing to be able to say. It doesn't change a Saturday in Greater Manchester. We still show up early. We still stay until the dancefloor is actually a dancefloor.
Rain is not a disaster. It is a look.
This is the North West. It rains. If you book a Manchester wedding photographer and you're praying for a cloudless June, I wish you well, I really do. I'll also tell you that some of the photographs I care about most were made in weather that looked, on paper, like a write-off.
The picture at the top of this post is that. Night, heavy rain, wet pavement, two people in wedding clothes who decided the weather could wait. Backlit, a bit cinematic, a bit reckless. That's the job on some days. Not hanging around for perfect. Making something with what you've got.
If it pours, we don't hide in a doorway for three hours muttering about the forecast. We find the light, we use the reflections, we get you a photograph that looks like a still from a film, then we get you back inside before the mascara gives up. You don't have to love rain. You just have to not be frightened of it.
Places we keep going back to
We're based in Worsley, so a lot of our Manchester wedding photography sits close to home. Worsley Court House. Walkden Gardens. The canal. Then further out: Great John Street Hotel in town, Last Drop Village in Bolton, Samlesbury Hall in Preston, Bolton School, Eaves Hall in Lancashire, Chester, the Lake District, Engine Shed in Wetherby. Different rooms, same brief. Make a piece of art out of a family's joy, and don't get in the way of the day while you do it.
I still like the local ones. There's something about photographing a wedding a few miles from the studio, then driving home past the same brick and the same rain, knowing the files on the cards are going to become the pictures on someone's wall for the next fifty years.
If you want us there
The standard wedding fee is £1500, and it's negotiable depending on distance and what you actually need. I'm not going to turn this into a sales page. If you've found this because you're getting married, and you want a husband and wife team who will treat your people like people, come and talk to us.
Eleven years in, still packing the bags twice. Still asking Jessica what's wrong with a photograph before I send it. Still slightly amazed anyone lets us in the room for the important bits.
If you'd like us at yours, get in touch via the contact page on travisphoto.co.uk. Tell us the date, the place, and anything that matters to your family. We'll take it from there.
