Oh Pinterest, where have you been all my life? This is the most amazing tool to help you gather wedding inspiration. If you are a scatty creative type like us, you can keep all your inspiration together in one place to prevent your head from exploding! If you are not, but know you don’t want the usual fluffy white wedding, wedding magazines aren’t really doing it for you, and you’re not sure where else to look… start with Pinterest! It’s not just a whole bunch of beautiful pictures, they actually link to the web source, so you’ll come across all the top wedding blogs as well as many, many weird and wonderful blogs and websites you never knew existed! Honestly, it’ll open up a whole world of ooos and aaahs! I started with a wedding inspiration board titled Wedding Treasure Trove, and found so many amazing things, I ended up with eight more; Our Home, Scrummy Party Spreads (for you foodies), Penny’s Wardrobe Wishlist, Hair Envy, Tattoo Admiration, Tino&Pip’s Posts, We ♥ Brighton by the Sea and Bits & Bobs!

Wedding Treasure Trove: ”A homage to all things wedding! Wedding inspiration for DIY, handmade, vintage, retro, funky, alternative, quirky or just down right stunning!”

Our Home: ”We are interior design addicts… ultimately we will be designing and building our own forever home, but for the time being we can dream…”

Scrummy Party Spreads: ”Swoon and salivate! Amazing wedding cakes, cupcakes, cake pops, wedding buffet ideas, sweetie tables, you name it, we’ve found it!”

*WARNING* Pinterest is highly addictive and may cause sleep deprivation, lack of attention at work, day dreaming and truly inspired weddings.

We spent Sunday fighting the London traffic so that we could set up a stand at The Alternative Wedding Fair in Piccadilly. Boy was it worth it! Not only did we meet some lovely, enthusiastic and quirky couples, but the venue, the Piccadilly Institute, was unique and rather entrancing – we kept spotting unusual decor at every turn! Check out the naked people looming out of the walls and hanging from the ceiling!

(A good tagline for Martin?!)

It was great to listen to the inspired wedding ideas of our visitors – all of your weddings sounded truly remarkable, and we are utterly envious of anyone who gets to attend! It was definitely the place for someone to find an alternative wedding photographer. In between chats with all the other lovely exhibitors, we managed (with great difficulty of course!) to convince the couples we spoke to that our fabulous giant jar of Smarties might be worth winning, should they correctly guess how many Smarties were actually sitting in it! Well we finally managed to tot up the little blighters and are pleased to announce ***Holly Wild*** as the winner! Congratulations Holly – we’ll be in touch very shortly so that we can get those Smarties to you asap!

Thanks again to Heidi at The Alternative Wedding Fair – we had a lot of fun (in between the crazy traffic) and hope we can be at the next one!

I was really sad to hear that Kodak filed for bankruptcy last week. One of their films, Kodachrome, is quite possibly one of the most beautiful things that ever happened in photography, and opened up the opportunity for millions of people to experience colour photography – it was as revolutionary in the twentieth century as digital has been in the twenty-first! Some of my very favourite photos were shot on Kodachrome, by the likes of William Albert Allard and Sam Abell. Now neither of us has ever shot Kodachrome, but I knew that my parents had, so we spent the day with them recently looking through some old photos. I was amazed when I discovered these photos were actually pretty damn good – go mum and dad!

Vintage Wedding Photography? We both started out photographing with film – in fact the rather lovely Rolleiflex camera you see in our website’s menu was used to take the two photos below! We’ve been asked if we use our film cameras for our business, but as of yet it just hasn’t happened – it’s hard enough to keep track of all the digital cameras dangling from your neck let alone a fifty year old mechanical wonder that may or may not break at any time! Given how fashion is very vintage and retro-orientated at the moment, it’s no surprise that there is also a movement in alternative wedding photography that is fixated on offering that retro or vintage film look in their wedding photos.

Some photographers, like Jose Villa, are actually using film, as their wedding services come with a premium price which can cover the enormous cost of processing and scanning the film. For the majority of photographers, this isn’t an option, but digital photography has opened up a whole world of opportunity for all photographers, especially when it comes to colour, and we’ve seen loads of vintage film effects popping up all over the place! The funny thing is its really hard to mimic a lot of films like the Kodachrome that my parents used – there’s an inherent (and beautiful) look which everyone seems to have spent ages trying to recreate, but can’t quite reach. We tried too, but eventually we said sod it, lets just do something completely new! Of course, if anyone does pull off that perfect Kodachrome effect, count us first in the queue!

We’ve been in Eastbourne for just over a year and a half now, and we are absolutely loving it! Not only has the move led to the discovery of a shared love for Boot Fairs and junk shop shopping….

….(“how much for the two chairs?”, “free?!!”, “um, ok then!”) but we’re now really close to Brighton, and browsing the Brighton Laines is the perfect way to keep our creativity stimulated (especially with our own wedding coming up!).

One thing we loved hearing last year was advice from our couples on how quickly the last few months of planning flies by – made us realise we’re really all one big family of wedding folk sharing the experience together! Having a giant about-turn on how we were going to do it has really spiced things up though. We had originally wanted a woodland wedding, and were actually quite far into planning it before realising that the practicalities to make our venue livable were a bit beyond us. All was not wasted however, as the many, many treasures we had collected from boot fairs and charity shops (which currently live in boxes sprawled over our dining table and across the living room!), are actually perfectly suited to our new wedding too!

We’re so excited about the weddings we have coming up this year, and utterly tickled that we’ll be photographing them as Mr & Mrs! We feel like we really had a ‘Eureka’ moment when it came to our wedding photography last year, and we’ve taken a hard look at Tino&Pip and think we’re going to come back even stronger this year. We cannot wait to get cracking on 2012′s weddings and give our couples their finished photos!

Diversity ‘ey?! HAPPY NEW YEAR! xxx

Pop back for Parts 2 & 3 over the next couple of days, in which we shall be showcasing some of our favourite moments and details from all the wonderful weddings we have been lucky enough to photograph in 2011!