2024 SEASON WRAP
Phew.
OK, it was not quite as full on as the 2022 season was which to date (and for evermore), will be a year I will never repeat. (Pure workload of 33x weddings because of the ‘fun’ we did not have in 2020 and 2021 due to the Covid pandemic).
But 2024, is done & dusted and in the bag.
The season began for me in April with what was a slightly out of/pre-season wedding, but turned out to be one of the best days for weather of the year. Never saw that one coming…
And that was perhaps the main story of 2024, the utterly trash weather most of Western Europe suffered. I have never experienced a year like it in my career and for something like 70-75% of wedding days, the forecast was at least rain, if not storms! We get a few doom & gloom forecasts every year, but not for the majority of weddings…
In the end, it did not quite pan out like that with only a couple of weddings receiving rain, at least on the actual wedding day, that had any real effect. At least not the weddings I attended which is another reason why any couple should chose me, - because I have special powers over the weather. Or I was just luckier than most of my colleagues…
So many days were touch and go and because of the forecast, many outdoor planned events were shifted indoors so as not to take any risk and in most of those cases, a bit of a shame as those were always the days when the weather turned out to be great!
The season then ended for me a few weeks later than usual with a 3rd weekend in October and once again, we got away with what the forecast predicted, but it was really pushing it for an outdoor planned wedding, even in SW France.
In summary, the only real low(s) of the entire 2024 season was the crummy weather because all of the weddings I attended went more or less without a hitch.
I can’t say with any honesty I actually enjoyed the drive to Austria and back (approx 3000km) but hey, the scenery was great once I got there. And it stopped raining! Which it actually did for the wedding day despite a forecast storm.
Highlight of the year, also not in France (but that is not France’s fault), was a wedding in Jersey. Both for the wedding I covered there and the actual island.
The best way I can really summarise the 2024 season though is in the pictures and video I captured and those can be viewed below.
Before watching either of these two 2024 Highlight Reels, I should point out that making these things is both a labour of love and an utter pain in the arse.
The former should be obvious why. The latter because I delivered something like 15,000 edited photos to clients in what is now last year and each client gallery has anything from 150-250 personal favourites (ie, I could have made a highlight reel from any single wedding) and I tried to sum up the entire year in just 100 images.
Well that was never going to happen and it ended up being 175 images from just 10 weddings and the 10 weddings I used were not selected by me, but by family, friends and colleagues so many weddings didn’t even get a single picture featured, but to get it down to just over 1% was no simple task!
So a few loose ends to tidy up and then it won’t be so long until it all kicks off again, in May this time…