It can take weeks, months or even years to plan the perfect wedding day, or in the case of Ally & James, the blink of an eye. This Hunter Valley Covid-19 Backyard Wedding came together pretty quickly as their original plans for a larger wedding weren’t able to be. After a few back and forth messages with a Wedding Photographer friend of mine, I received a phone call from James, some time around 10pm on Friday 8th May. We spoke and hatched a plan for me to photograph their wedding portraits the next day as a surprise gift for Ally, who had no idea this was going on.
Saturday May 9 2020 was a period of time where restrictions on people at weddings were limited to 5 people maximum. That mean’t that I wasn’t able to be in the backyard of Ally’s parents place to photograph the ceremony. The plan was for James to bring Ally out front once the formalities had finished and we’d shoot some portraits nearby. A stroke of luck and a crazy twist of fate had me photographing the ceremony in the front yard off a mobile phone that was watching the live stream. The owner of the phone was James’ sister who was there to surprise James. He had no idea she was waiting out front, but Ally knew. So you see, these guys had this crazy double cross surprise thing going and I happened to be caught in the middle of it, part of it and also photographing it. It was fantastic and without doubt one of the most enjoyable weddings I’ve done. We shot portraits across the road in a bush reserve with beautiful afternoon light. There were plenty of laughs, a few little tears and some cheers with beers!
