For the first time, I’ve been named one of the Top 10 Wedding Photographers in the World by the Wedding Photojournalist Association 🌍
This one feels different.
What Makes The Wedding Photojournalist Association So Special?
The WPJA is a unique documentary wedding photography competition because only photographs captured in 2025 are eligible for entry. No dipping into the archives. No resubmitting old favourites. Just fresh, non-posed photos created in the chaos and beauty of fabulous wedding days.
Across four rounds of judging in 2025, my work received 12 awards 🏆
To have those moments recognised on a global stage is something I’ll never take for granted.
Awards are never the goal, however – the goal is always storytelling. Authentic photography storytelling that sparks memories of what the wedding day felt like to be a part of. It’s what I love to capture, and it’s what every couple expects from me.
The Moments Behind the Awards
Every award-winning image came from weddings where my couple trusted me completely. They let me into their space. They embraced the unpredictable.
Documentary wedding photography only works when couples prioritise experience over perfection – when they care more about being fully present than performing for the camera.
The photos below will show you exactly what I mean – real laughter, and real joy.
No posing. No recreating. Just living in the moment.
Thanks to all my awesome couples of 205- this recognition belongs to you just as much as it does to me.
And to the future couples who value real moments over perfect ones, I can’t wait to tell your story.
Cheers!
Many of these wedding photos were taken in Nottinghamshire and the surrounding areas. Some of the wedding venues included: Swanely Meadows in Cheshire, The Walled Garden and Thorpe Garden in Staffordshire
Twelve awards across four judging rounds is a serious result, especially in a competition that limits the pool to a single calendar year’s work. There’s no carrying forward a portfolio favourite from three weddings ago.
The WPJA structure is interesting for this reason: it holds you accountable to where you actually were as a photographer in those twelve months, not just your strongest-ever frame. A different kind of discipline.
That emphasis on documentary over direction resonates for evening receptions in particular. Steer the room and you lose it. At LemonLens in London we find the same: the best frames from the evening are almost always the ones nobody knew were being taken.
Most photography competitions allow historical submissions. Five years of work, ten years, whatever’s in the archive. WPJA’s current-year-only rule strips that out — what you shot in 2025, in whatever conditions those weddings handed you. Nothing more.
The trust point is where it gets interesting. Couples who’ve actually absorbed the documentary approach produce fundamentally different images to couples who’ve hired a documentary photographer but still arrive expecting their photographer to set up each shot and guide them through the day. Not because one group is more photogenic. Because the atmosphere changes entirely when someone stops performing. Unguarded moments only arrive when a person has let go.
I shoot documentary weddings in London through LemonLens, and the brief from couples who’ve done their research versus couples who haven’t is almost a different conversation entirely. The ones who come in clear tend to reference specific images rather than lists of services. Work produced with those couples reflects that.