Cheshire

Cheshire is a county built for weddings and it knows it. Between the flat farmland of the Cheshire Plain and the western edge of the Peak District you get country estates, Georgian halls, walled gardens and converted farm buildings sitting within half an hour of one another, and unlike a lot of England most of them come with proper grounds attached rather than a car park and a marquee. It is why couples from Manchester, Liverpool and Stoke all end up looking here, and why the good dates go early.

I am based in Halifax, which puts Cheshire about ninety minutes down the M62 and M6. That matters less than you would think. What it means in practice is that I arrive the way I would for a wedding ten minutes from home: early, unhurried, and with the light and the locations worked out before anybody has put a dress on. I would rather leave at six and be sat outside your venue at eight than turn up at the same time as your florist.

Knutsford is the centre of gravity for Cheshire weddings, and the two venues I have shot so far sit either side of it. Colshaw Hall is at Over Peover, 300 acres of private estate with a Grade II listed hall, a walled garden and a Japanese garden with a stone bridge over the water. Owen House Wedding Barn is at Mobberley, a family-run working farm with a converted barn, a straw-bale shed that is one of the best portrait backdrops in the county, and fields in every direction. They could not be less alike, and both are exclusive use, which is the single thing that changes photographs most: one wedding on site, no other party in the next room, and nobody wandering through your portraits on the way to their own reception.

What is genuinely different about photographing in Cheshire is the space. Yorkshire venues tend to hand you drama and weather; Cheshire hands you room. Long lawns, mature trees, wide skies over flat land, and estates big enough that a hundred and eighty guests never feel packed in. The light lasts too, because there is no valley side to lose it behind at half six in July. The trade is that you have to work harder to make a photograph feel specific rather than pretty, which is where knowing the venue in advance earns its money.

The way I shoot does not change with the postcode. Roughly five per cent posed and ninety five per cent real, family groups done quickly and without fuss, and the rest of the day spent photographing what actually happens rather than arranging it. If your Cheshire wedding is more about the people in the room than the place settings on the table, we will get on.