The Wedding Reporter ~

The email was so casual it was borderline unimportant. “I totally forgot I’d quoted some stuff for Harper’s Bazaar Australia – they are asking for some images – I wonder whether you had  a couple of nice high-res images I could send off to them?”

Below this request was a forwarded message from someone at the magazine, detailing that indeed Annabel from Love My Dress had mentioned hiring a wedding reporter as one of her top tips and asking for a suitable image to accompany the quote. Given that I can’t even get British wedding magazine editors to mention me, even when they feature real weddings that I’ve worked on, this was incomparably massive.

And disastrous.

This entire chain of emails set off a huge panic as at that time, Leah had just rebranded all of the books, changing the look, feel, size, shape, presentation, layout, stock…well, just about everything about the report books. We had just put the order for 5 sample books in at the printer. Neither of us had an image of the shiny new tomes; heck, neither of us had even laid our hands on a hard copy by that point.

I rather cheekily asked Annabel to put them off for a week, knowing that my ship may well have sailed by the time my samples arrived, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to send them an image of an out of date product, especially when I knew how glorious the new incarnation was going to be. Leah had worked too hard on the new version not to showcase them properly.

When the package did finally come, I ripped it open and knew that I’d made the right decision: the books were gorgeous. I ignored the derisive snort my husband gave as I set up my own product photo shoot in our kitchen, using the black base of our treadmill as a set and panicking about the rapidly diminishing evening light. I began frantically clicking away on our very basic DSLR, pausing only to ask Twitter what settings my camera should be on and screaming in frustration at every photographer who thought I understood what f-stop was.

I uploaded about 50 images, some of complete blurry uselessness and a couple that might just, with enough editing, be passable. I sent them to Annabel who, God bless her, touched them up a bit for me and send them through to an editor in Australia who I should imagine had been sitting at their desk drumming their fingers for the entire time waiting for my one picture so that they could go to print.

It was worth it. The image made it into the magazine alongside Annabel’s comment and even a little link to my website. So, it may be 4 inches to you, but to me it’s a whole tale of blood, sweat and tears and it’s the reason that I have a very big smile on my face this week.