About Me
For an up to the week look at what I’m interested in and what I’m taking pictures of other than weddings, have a look at www.chrisgrover.co.uk and don’t forget to check out the News pages on this site.
When you are thinking about arranging to meet a wedding photographer, what do you want to know about them? Rather than ploughing through an exhaustive biography, a Q&A can sometimes be more revealing of the character behind the lens. With that in mind here are a few pointers…
What are you listening to: Top of the current playlist is Joe Smooth – early Chicago House, but it’s just as likely to be modern jazz funk. Trashy seventies disco and The Doors also make an appearance from time to time as do Philip Glass and John Taverner.
Where are you going on holiday: This year it’s two weeks in the South of France, last year it was a week in a seafront house in Cromer. I love being near the sea and North Norfolk is one of my favourite areas.
What do you do when you’re not working: Go over to the beach with my wife and two boys (and swim if it’s warm) visit family and friends, watch my 9 year old play in goal for the local football team and take pictures of all of the above!
Why do you love photography: I like lots of art and creative processes, but with photography I particularly liked the ‘craft’ aspect of it – the darkroom, mixing up chemicals and that magic moment under the red safelight when your print starts to develop. It was also something that I was able to learn myself – I would have loved to have been taught to draw properly at school, but it just didn’t happen. Technology has moved on and a lot of work is done digitally now, but for weddings, digital photography is very much about convenience and reducing costs. I’m using more and more film for my wedding photography as people just love the look. It’s hard to see the difference on a computer screen because they are designed for digital display, but a properly produced print, framed or in a nice album is still something special. Of course it’s possible to try and recreate this look on the computer, but it’s not quite the same and why try to recreate something when you can have the original?
So have you been taking pictures for a long time then: Since the age of 10.
Have you always been a wedding photographer: No, when I was a teenager I wanted to be a documentary photographer and at the age of 19 I went to Croatia to photograph the war that was going on at the time. When I came back to England I realised that there just weren’t the opportunities to pursue that sort of career and still live in rural East Anglia, rather than basing myself in London so I changed tack and worked in the wine industry for the next 15 years. However I continued photographing throughout this period and took the photographs for several friends weddings and people saw the pictures, liked them and phoned me up and the business snowballed from there. I suppose that you could say that I’ve photographed weddings for 20 years, but been a proper wedding photographer for about 4 years now!
Our Relationship
I can’t stress enough how important it is to have a great relationship with your wedding photographer and if we meet up, you’ll discover that the most important things that contribute towards me producing fine, artistic photographs of your wedding are the relationships between the two of you and me, as well as the way I get on with your family and friends.
Read more about my wedding day photography services.