A Rain-Soaked Cotswolds Wedding, Shot on 35mm Film:

Ara & Akay

Some weddings are pretty. This one was alive — rain and all.

Ara and Akay were married at a honey-stone manor house tucked deep in the Cotswolds, the kind of place that looks like it was built specifically to be fallen in love in front of. And from the first pour of champagne to the very last note of the trumpet, it rained. Properly rained. Nobody minded in the slightest.

Two Families, Two Continents, One Very English Sky

Ara’s family flew in from New Orleans. Akay’s Turkish family arrived with their own traditions, their own warmth, their own way of celebrating — and somewhere between the two, under a soft grey English sky, it all just worked. That’s the bit I love most about shooting weddings across England: watching different worlds meet in one garden and instantly feel like they were always meant to.

It’s exactly why I shoot on analogue film. A wedding this layered — this many cultures, cities, and love languages folded into one day — deserves something with a bit of soul to it. 35mm film doesn’t try to make a day look perfect. It makes it look true, which is so much better.

The Venue: Quintessentially English, Effortlessly Grand

This Cotswolds house is the sort of place you picture when someone says “English country wedding” — ivy climbing right up the honey-stone facade, clipped box hedges tracing the gravel drive, a weathered stone urn standing sentinel like it’s been there for centuries (it has). Beyond the house, the topiary gives way to a walled garden and a circular fountain, framed by trees old enough to have their own opinions, where guests gathered to watch Ara and Akay say their vows.

Shooting a setting like this on film is one of the great joys of the job. There’s a softness to 35mm that makes an English garden look exactly as romantic on paper as it feels standing in it — something digital, for all its sharpness, rarely manages.

Rain, Confetti, and Real, Unfiltered Joy

The forecast had threatened rain for days and made good on every threat. But watch the guests lining that aisle as Ara and Akay walked back through a shower of confetti — laughing, soaked through, utterly delighted — and you’d never guess the sky had anything to complain about. A great wedding does that. It turns weather into a footnote.

This is where film earns its keep. The unguarded laugh, the veil catching the wind, a hand steadying a hat against the rain — these are the moments that get lost on a screen full of instant previews. Film asks you to slow down and trust what’s actually happening in front of you, and it rewards you with something that feels like a memory rather than a photograph.

From the Marquee to the Dance Floor

Inside, the marquee glowed against the grey evening — strings of fairy lights overhead, long tables dressed in trailing florals, kale and ripe tomatoes tumbling beside dahlias and orchids in a centrepiece that looked freshly cut from the garden (it very possibly was).

As the light dropped, a New Orleans-style jazz band struck up, and the whole wedding party spilled out in one glorious, dancing procession — trombone, tuba, and snare drum leading bride, groom, and guests down a lantern-lit path towards the drinks reception and cake cutting. A perfect, joyful nod to Ara’s Louisiana roots, dropped straight into the English countryside. It turned the walk between marquee and reception into its own celebration, rather than a gap between the good bits.

Why I Shoot Weddings on Analogue Film

I get asked often why I still shoot on 35mm film when digital can show you the result in a second. Days like this one are the answer. Film has patience built into it — it asks you to trust the moment instead of chasing it, and what comes back is something that feels like a keepsake, not a snapshot. A wedding that brought together New Orleans warmth, Turkish tradition, and English countryside charm needed exactly that kind of patience to hold it all without flattening a single part of it.

If you’re planning a Cotswolds wedding, a marquee reception somewhere beautiful in the English countryside, or a destination wedding anywhere in the UK or beyond — I’d love to tell that story with you. Rain or shine.