Aaisha and Azhar's Wedding at Quendon Park

I enjoy photographing Muslim weddings, they are always very friendly events and having done so many over the years I know quite a lot of people. Quite how many was brought home to me at Aaisha and Azhar's wedding which had over 500 guests with a good number of them coming over during the day to say hello and thank me for covering a particular wedding. This was lovely and it's great to catch up with people but with so much going on and so many people to cover in a relatively short space of time I was actually starting to get a little concerned about getting all my work done.

These are very much social get togethers and everyone is wandering around talking while the formal preliminaries are going on, with the bride and her bridesmaids waiting in another room, this is often a long wait. Part way through the day an endless stream of amazing food starts to appear followed by people dragging me off to various tables to make sure I get fed. This is despite them having already filled me full of various snacks, nibbles and delicacies already. Like I said, these are very friendly events and hospitality is a huge part of it.

After some time Azhar went off to bring Aaisha to the wedding and they both made a grand entrance with the bridal party and the wedding ceremony took place conducted by the Imam. As well as the traditional Muslim part, they had decided to have a fusion of British tradition as well so Azhar had changed into a very stylish Downton Abbey style suit with a black and silver cane and we had the cutting of the cake and an exchange of rings ceremony, it ws a really nice touch.

In addition to the usual group and romantic photographs, I'd been given a special request. Azhar is mad keen on dinosaurs and wanted to do some photobombing. With this in mind I'd got them to buy some stock images of dinosaurs that I could Photoshop in and we went off round the grounds getting the groomsmen running in panic and various other shots to see what we could come up with. We managed to get some pretty cool looking things and there are quite a few other normal looking images that have a dinosaur hidden in them somewhere.

This was a really lovely and enjoyable day and Quendon Park is a great venue, especially if you are having a big wedding. You can find out details on their website: http://www.quendonpark.co.uk