We adopted a dog. Her name is Daphne, she is perfect, and she is without a doubt the most gorgeous dog ever in existence. Other things happened in 2017, but that’s the main thing you need to know.

For the most part, 2017 was pretty similar to 2016. I’ve been doing this for a while now, so each year is less about drastic changes, more about refining towards what I think wedding photography should be. As always, my aim is to have as little influence on the wedding as possible. But, I also want to connect with my couples & their guests, so it’s a balancing act getting that mix right. This year was pretty sweet in terms of that connection half – I got to see a bunch of my previous couples at other weddings and even hang out with a few of them during our time in the USA. It’s a surreal day when you walk along the Brooklyn waterfront and bump into a past bride, that’s for sure.

I’ve dipped my toes in to producing my own prints, a frustrating but thoroughly satisfying process. I picked up a fourth camera system (from Canon to Nikon, some Fuji, now a Sony). This stuff is partly gear obsession, but also wanting to know what the best tool for the job is, and have my hands on every stage of the process. Prints are the ultimate endpoint for any photo, so I’m really excited to be delivering a few gorgeous archival-quality images with each wedding now. I stopped bothering with captions/hashtags on Instagram. Hashtags felt like a messy scrawl on the bottom of my images and I just want to focus on the work.

It would be remiss to recap 2017 without a mention of the huge decision to update our archaic marriage law in Australia. I honestly thought this wouldn’t occur for many years yet, so it was incredible to see love prevail. It was particularly special to see the Newcastle electorate return one of the highest ‘yes’ votes in the country, at 74.8%. I can’t wait to document the weddings of an even wider variety of couples moving forward. It’s been beautiful hearing the new wording in recent ceremonies already.

Outside of weddings, Liv and I had a fairly eventful year. We were still in NZ for the first few days, which we spent terrified of bungie jumping (myself much more than Liv) and then doing it anyway. In winter we spent about 6 weeks in the USA, including having our vows renewed by Elvis in Vegas. I’ve never eaten so many burgers in my life. It was brilliant. We bought our first home, and a day after moving in adopted our first dog. We’ve wanted one for years, so now that we have some yard space and are traveling less we weren’t wasting any more time.

35 weddings, 34 portrait shoots. 33,120 photos. I’ve picked out the top 0.31% that make me feel something – some because of awesome light, many for a beautiful moment, but most of all just the snippets I managed to grab of people being their true selves and having the time of their lives.