marcbowker

Sarah & Stewart's Wedding, Lodge on Loch Lomond

March was filled with warm spring days and sunshine, looking good then for Sarah and Stewart's Loch-side wedding. Well, not quite. The day before we had snow. Chances of an outdoor ceremony dropped to zero, but there was a glimmer of hope in getting a snow capped Ben Lomond in the background for some shots. Well that never happened either due to the low cloud cover. Scottish weather eh?!

I've known Sarah for a few years now, first meeting her at one of her small business network events. It's been lovely to get to know both of them and to see their gorgeous girls Emily and Charlotte grow ever bigger. I'm very much looking forward to visiting them again in the coming weeks (they have a sparkly new coffee machine that looks like a Starbucks implant and I plan on testing out their new barista skills!).

Sarah, Stewart and I had talked on a few occasions about the wedding. One of the things I was very excited about was seeing the flowers and favours for the girls. I know I know, me, getting excited about flowers! Well, if I were to tell you that all of Sarah's flowers were grown from seed on Mill Pond Flower Farm especially for the occasion, would my excitement make sense? Other lovely details included Sarah's hand painted wedding shoes, some hand painted driftwood from Arran and 'that' cake! Lovely.

There was such a lovely atmosphere in Sarah's room where she was getting ready with her mum and sister. It has to be a first greeting a brides mother by her Twitter handle: Jane on Arran! Laura Gray also added to that atmosphere and was great to work with. Then watching Emily and Charlotte watch in awe of their mum in her wedding dress, fabulous.

All in all, Sarah & Stewart's wedding day was filled with awesomeness. I dare say it was their perfect day and the day they had planned for for so long, seeing everything come together. And they finally got to dance to Isn't She Lovely by Stevie Wonder! But if that wasn't enough, their second song was sung by Sarah's step sister who covered There You'll Be by Faith Hill, wow!

It was such an amazing privilege to spend the day with them and all of their friends and family. Thanks for having me. Here is a selection of my favourite images from the day, but before you delve right in, check out these fantastic people who all helped in some small way.

Laura Gray - hair and makeup - www.lauragray.co.uk

Three Isles Designs - wishing tree and flowers in hair - www.threeislesdesigns.com

Mill Pond Flower Farm - flowers - www.millpondflowerfarm.co.uk

Taste Linda's Cakes - wedding cake - www.tlscakes.co.uk

Lodge on Loch Lomond - venue - www.loch-lomond.co.uk

Make yourself a cuppa, the blog is back!

In the past 10 months lots of you have started following me on social media and/or taken a look on my website. In other words, you're probably new to One Big Picture Photography. For everybody else, you may remember that I used to blog about everything! Yes, it's been a whole 10 months since I wrote a blog, crikey!

A lot has happened in the last 10 months and one of the main reasons the blogging came to an abrupt halt is because we lost a member of our family. It was something that changed everything and it had a huge knock on effect to this little business that you see here. It was hard enough to keep it going let alone find the time to write blogs for you all to enjoy.

In October I made the massive and risky decision to shut my website down, for a month! A photographer without a website is just plain ridiculous and that was me. I decided to change everything, out with the old and in with the new and all that jazz. And so, on 30 November 2014 at precisely 8pm, I launched a brand new website and you could say, a brand new me. A whole new look and feel. At that precise time, going live with the new site was one of the scariest things I've done in recent times. Looking back, I realise it was because I had built it up so much in the days leading up to that night, expectations were high, but the rewards were plenty.

And here we are, finally, a brand new location for my blog, my ramblings and my sheer delight and being able to share with you my latest pieces of work. I've wanted to launch this for so many months now and do you know what was holding me back? Something so silly, so trivial and one of those mountains you build up in your head that really are nothing but a tiny hill. I'd originally planned to migrate my entire collection of former blog posts and place them here in the archives for you to look back on. But in an instant of spontaneous and combustive insanity, I thought what the hell, I'm just going to start afresh, from scratch and from the very beginning where you have a blank sheet of paper and a pen (or a keyboard, a screen and some fingers).

What you can expect

I'm going to try and write a blog at least once a week but hopefully more. I want blogging to become like second nature to me. For those of you who follow me on Facebook, you'll know that I post there, a lot. But I want the blog to be so much more.

I'll make every effort to blog about absolutely every piece of work I do, be it a wedding, a pre-wedding shoot, a Lifestyle family shoot or some of the amazing small businesses I work with.

In between sharing with you my latest work, I'm going to try and write about things that are important to me that I think you'll enjoy. My family, my kids, our adventures or just life in general and whatever takes my fancy. Why? Because I was, I am and I could be your photographer. But behind that camera? I'm me. Marc, a human being, a good old laugh a guy who is just like you. And I always get to know everyone I work with a little bit more, either before, during or after the shoot. So why shouldn't you get to know me a bit better too? If you haven't already, I can highly recommend you take a look at 'My Story' to give you a head start.

So sit back, make yourself a cuppa and enjoy because the blog is most definitely back!