Maritime Museum Wedding Photographer: Rowena and Bryan, Dún Laoghaire

Maritime Museum, Dun Laoghaire. Rowena, Bryan and Se

Their son Sé walked into the middle of the vows.

Rowena and Bryan were standing at the top of the room in the National Maritime Museum with fifty people in front of them. Sé (their four year old son) decided that was where he belonged and planted himself between the two of them. He stayed there for the first kiss. The whole room was in stitches and that frame is one of my favourites of the year.

Rowena and Bryan asked me to be their Maritime Museum wedding photographer for a Friday at the end of July. Fifty guests, two small boys, a ceremony in Dún Laoghaire and a walk down the road for dinner. No convoy of cars. No hotel ballroom. Everything they did that day happened within about a kilometre of the sea.

I live in Dún Laoghaire. I have photographed weddings the length of the country and this one was five minutes from my front door, which is a strange and lovely thing after years of setting off for Tipperary at seven in the morning.

A slow morning at the Haddington

No hair and makeup team, no early start, no room full of people waiting around. Rowena popped out, got it done and came back. That tells you the temperature of the whole morning.

Bryan got ready at the Haddington House Hotel with Sé and Vince, who are two and four and were dressed better than most of the adults. Rowena was upstairs with her girls and her mother, in a room with a window looking out over Scotsman's Bay.

I came in at the end of it, for the first look. The girls cleared out, Bryan came up with the two boys and the boys ran straight into her arms. Bryan's eyes went. He got about four seconds of composure before Sé and Vince did what two and four year olds do and started working their way around the room, investigating the bits and pieces.

Kids at a wedding change the shape of the day. I photographed Evie and Max in Dublin city with their two small children in the ceremony and it was the same thing. Nobody gets to be precious. Everything moves.

The ceremony at the Maritime Museum

The museum is the old Mariners' Church. There is a lighthouse lens the size of a small car standing in the middle of the floor. Fifty people in that room feels right. It is high and it is bright and it holds a small crowd without swallowing them.

The room had been decorated beautifully. Flowers everywhere, on the ends of the seats, along the front.

Catherine McWade married them at half two. Doug Sheridan sang. It was warm and it was short and it was full of people who all knew each other, which is not something you can say about every ceremony.

Then Sé arrived up for the kiss.

Prosecco in the courtyard

The sun held for the rest of the afternoon. The Irish Horse Box Bar set up in the courtyard outside the museum and poured prosecco. Doug Sheridan came out and kept going. He was taking requests. There were guests dancing on the cobbles at four in the afternoon with the old church behind them.

This is the part of a wedding day I would keep if I could only keep one. Nobody is being organised. There is no queue for photographs and no room to be moved into. There are just fifty people standing in the sun in the middle of a town. I get to walk around and watch.

The gap between a half two ceremony and a seven o clock meal is the thing couples worry about when we sit down and work out a wedding day timeline. Rowena and Bryan filled theirs with sunshine, a horse box bar and a singer taking requests. Nobody looked at a watch. ‍

Dinner and a park with nobody in it

People's Park Café is a small building in the middle of the park and it suited a wedding of this size perfectly. Emmie and her team had it ready and fed everyone from about seven. There was no cake. There were cheese platters stacked on top of each other, which I would take over a cake any day of the week.

I left them to their dinner.

By the time they came back out, the park had closed for the evening. Rowena and Bryan had told me they were shy about having their photographs taken in public, which is the single most common thing couples say to me and one of the reasons I shoot the way I do. As it turned out the gates were shut and they had the entire park to themselves.

Confetti at the fountain with the low sun behind it. A short couple shoot that was finished before it ever got uncomfortable. Then I climbed up on the roof of the café for the full group, fifty faces looking up at me with the trees and the park behind them. That one is getting printed.

Ukebox and the end of it

Ukebox played the evening and Rowena and Bryan had their first dance in a café in a park. Everyone who had been dancing outside the museum at four was still going.

Why Dún Laoghaire suits a wedding this size

Most of what I get asked for as a documentary wedding photographer in Dublin is a big country house with a long drive. Days like this one are quietly becoming my favourite kind of work. I photographed Yana and Chris with ten guests in the city last year and the feeling was identical. When there are fifty people in the room instead of two hundred and fifty, everybody is actually at the wedding.

Dún Laoghaire gives you the museum, the sea, the pier, the park and a town you can walk across in twenty minutes. If you are looking at venues around the county, I have written a photographer's guide to Dublin wedding venues. There is also an intimate wedding package on my packages page built for exactly this kind of day.

Being the Maritime Museum wedding photographer for a Friday like this is about as good as the job gets. I did not direct anything except one group photo and a few minutes at the fountain. The rest of it just happened and I was there for it

Rowena and Bryan, thank you for letting me in on it and for giving me a wedding I could walk home from. Sé and Vince, you made the photograph of the day between you.

If you are planning something similar and you need a Maritime Museum wedding photographer, or a Dún Laoghaire wedding photographer who lives around the corner, get in touch.