In July 2002 there happened a little boutique wedding in the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. A warm evening, a few drinks, delicious food alongside family and friends. The groom is a shyish young man wearing a tie for the first time in his life. The bride literally created her own dress and got a pair of white shoes decorated by a shoemaker. Her bouquet was a present from a good friend. And there was a pool covered with petals and candles. The photographer/videographer was a friend who volunteered to record a few moments as much wasn’t expected. The night ended with cheerful laughter and good memories. There began a new chapter in the young couple’s lives. They were due to sail to Australia in a few months.

Upon return from a short honey moon, when the pictures and the recorded memories were copied onto the computer, it was a truly heart-breaking disaster. Dark, blurry pictures alongside with a video which mostly consisted of recordings of the floor instead of the couple for most of the night.

This is my wedding night twelve years ago. At the time, I had so much going on in my mind, my wedding photos weren’t a big concern to me. At the time I believed I was going to be young forever, literally. I couldn’t imagine myself as a forty year old with a daughter with whom one day I would sit down and point at the pictures in an album and share stories with her. It pains me today. I missed on a big opportunity. My mother had no pictures to share with me but she never had the opportunity that was granted to me either. Like many brides, I wanted to save and I thought it wasn’t that big of a deal. Surely a friend could provide decent enough pictures for the memory of it. Well ours didn’t, yours might. With the advent of entry level digital SLRs and smart phones with ever increasing megapixel counts you will probably get heaps of your own photos for your special occasion but there’s something magical when someone is there for the sole purpose of immortalising your memories and you get a sequence of story telling images that will mean something special for the rest of your life. And then some.

This is my mum and dad. They had never been photographed as kids, as youngsters, or on their wedding day. A whole different world. This picture here is the result of my father’s own effort years later, taking two passport photos to a local studio to have them “stitched” together.

And these are few from our wedding from that happy, warm Mediterranean evening…