Why I do this

Welcome to the shiny new Christina Beam Photography website! Thanks for dropping by.

It’s been a fabulous year of lots of happy pictures – beaming brides and grooms, grandparents and babies, missing-teeth kids, and everything in between.

I’ve been to more weddings this summer than I’d been to in the rest of my life combined, and I teared up at every single one.

Recently I had an old friend from my days as a journalist ask me what I see in wedding photography. He just didn’t get it.

So I told him this story.

Not long ago I photographed a wedding for a bride whose parents had long been divorced. Her mother and father and step-father and step-mother – they don’t all get along so well, I was warned. Just do the best you can for the family photos, she told me.

After the wedding, when the gallery was up, the bride called me on the verge of tears. She had spent years being torn between her separated parents, she said. In the photos, she got to see them together again on the most important day of her life so far.

She saw them sitting in the pews and crying, together, as she took her vows. She saw them dancing together at the reception, hands clasped, smiling at each other for the first time in a decade.

The bride was thrilled with every photo from that day, but it was the images of her parents that she knew were now part of her family history.

“I couldn’t put a price on it,” she said.

Every wedding has a story, and I make it my mission to tell that story in photos that will stand the test of time on their own and within the history of your family. I never lose sight of the importance of that job, and it’s my great joy to do it.

Thank you again for your visit. Have a look around the new site, let me know what you think. If you’re planning a big day of your own or want to document your family’s story, email me any time at photos@christinabeam.com.