Wuthering Heights Part III; Same Story, Different Eyes,
Laura Fitzgerald Photography
Vicky Dubois Photography
Why choosing a wedding photographer is about more than finding photographs you like.
Put two brilliant photographers in the same place, at the same moment, with the same couple in front of them and you might assume you'd end up with two similar wedding galleries… you won't. That was one of the unexpected gifts of our Wuthering Heights editorial at Sheriff Hutton Castle.
For the final part of this series, we wanted to look at something we don't talk about enough when choosing wedding suppliers: creative perspective.
Both Vicky Dubois Photography and Laura Fitzgerald Photography, captured the shoot; same ruins, same couple, same dress, same styling, same winter light… two distinctly different ways of seeing it all.
That's important if you're choosing your wedding photographer, because portfolios aren't simply showing you whether somebody can take a beautiful photograph. They're showing you what that person notices.
A photographer doesn't just record what's there. It's tempting to think of wedding photography as documentation but look through the work of different photographers and you quickly realise how much more is happening. Where do they stand? How close do they get? Do they instinctively look at the couple, or at the enormous, ruined building surrounding them? Do they photograph the whole table, or notice the candle burning beside one place setting? Do they wait for stillness or movement? Do they love clean compositions, or layers and things partially obscuring the frame?
None of these choices is right or wrong, they're authorship. And at Sheriff Hutton, we got to see that authorship twice.
Vicky Dubois Photography: building the world around the couple
Vicky Dubois Photography
There is an extraordinary sense of place in Vicky's photographs. She doesn't simply use the castle as a backdrop. She uses everything around Laura and Matt - architecture, winter light, darkness, candlelight, smoke - to tell us something about the people standing within it.
Vicky's photographs aren't really about the ruins. They're about what happens when she makes two people feel as though they belong to them.
There is intimacy here. But Vicky often builds a world around that intimacy. Her compositions give relationships a setting, a mood and sometimes a sense of mythology. For couples who have spent months or years imagining not simply how their wedding will look but how they want it to feel, that can be incredibly powerful.
Perhaps you've chosen to marry in a ruined abbey because standing amongst all that history means something to you. Perhaps you're planning a ceremony in a forest, a candlelit manor, on a windswept moor or inside some gloriously strange building that made you both say this is it.
You may not want that place reduced to background scenery. You might want photographs that remember what it felt like to be tiny beneath those enormous walls, to disappear together into the fog, to stand in candlelight while everything beyond you fell into darkness, to look like the protagonists in the story you've been writing together.
That's where Vicky's work becomes particularly compelling.
She doesn't just preserve what happened. She preserves the world it happened in. And she uses that world to make the people within it feel cinematic, romantic and significant.
Her photographs often feel like stills from a much larger story. Not because the people have disappeared beneath the concept. Because they are the reason the story exists at all.
Laura Fitzgerald Photography: finding the moments that make the story yours
Laura Fitzgerald Photography
Laura's photographs bring another instinct to that same world.
Her eye repeatedly returns to what is happening between people. Expressions become important. Gestures become important. The small changes in somebody's face become important. There's an immediacy to many of her photographs - a sense that rather than being invited to look into the scene, we're already standing somewhere inside it.
That brings a wonderfully human energy to something as atmospheric as this shoot, because weddings are strange creatures. You can spend months creating a beautiful world for one day… choosing the clothes, flowers, decor, colours, ceremony and setting that somehow feel like you, and then actual humans arrive and make it gloriously unpredictable. Someone laughs when they're supposed to look serious. Someone squeezes a hand. A carefully arranged piece of fabric gets caught by the wind.
Laura has an instinct for those fragments. Even within a constructed editorial, she looks for the moments where the construction falls away a little and the personalities underneath come through. Her portraits have atmosphere, her details preserve the textures of the world around them, and she uses the surroundings too. But there is a lovely sense of proximity to the way she tells the story.
For couples who want to look back and immediately remember the people, the exchanges, the laughter and the tiny moments they may not even have realised were happening, that's an enormously appealing way of seeing a wedding.
Rather than pulling us further into the world around Laura and Matt, she frequently draws us closer to the pair themselves.
But how do you go about choosing your photographer?
One of the biggest tips, besides chatting to them and seeing if you connect, is to look at a full wedding gallery and see how it makes you feel and think about how you want to remember your day.
Do you want to be transported back into the world you created together - the scale of the building, the strange winter light, the weather rolling across the landscape, the way the candles transformed the room after dark?
Do you want your wedding to feel almost mythic in retrospect: the two of you placed right at the centre of this extraordinary world?
Or perhaps you want to be pulled immediately back towards the people inside that world - an expression you recognise instantly, a ridiculous laugh, somebody reaching for somebody else, the little interactions that made the carefully planned day unmistakably yours.
Most photographers will give you some of both. Neither Vicky Dubois Photography or Laura Fitzgerald Photography fits neatly inside a box, and these galleries prove it. But photographers have instincts and things their eyes seem to find without being asked.
Your photographer isn't simply deciding whether an image is correctly exposed or beautifully composed. They're deciding hundreds of times throughout your wedding: Look at this. This matters. This is worth remembering.
And the wonderful thing about seeing Vicky Dubois Photography and Laura Fitzgerald Photography capture the same world is that neither answer was wrong.
They simply noticed different reasons it mattered.
