Some weddings take about ten minutes to work out.
Milly and Jack’s was one of them.
From the black bridesmaid dresses to the amount of energy everyone brought with them, the whole day felt properly alive. Nothing overly polished or forced. People were there to have a bloody good time, which is exactly the sort of wedding I enjoy photographing.
They got married at Oakhill Cromford in Derbyshire on 8 August 2026, with a mix of digital photography and 35mm film throughout the day.
A summer wedding at Oakhill Cromford
If you’ve not been to Oakhill before, it’s tucked away in Cromford in the Derbyshire countryside. The house itself is Grade II listed and Georgian in style, surrounded by landscaped gardens in the historic Derwent Valley. Oakhill is licensed for civil ceremonies and can also be hired exclusively for weddings, which means the place can properly become yours for the day. oakhillcromford.co.uk
And photographically, it gives you loads to work with.
The building has plenty of character without feeling stuffy, while outside you’ve got greenery, mature gardens and enough space to disappear for ten minutes without turning the couple portraits into a full-scale expedition.
That suited Milly and Jack perfectly.
Black bridesmaid dresses and a very good decision
The black bridesmaid dresses deserve their own mention.
Against all the green around Oakhill they looked ridiculously good. Clean, modern and slightly more fashion-led than the usual wedding palette.
They also photographed brilliantly.
One of the things I’m increasingly drawn to at weddings is contrast. Dark tailoring, black dresses, bright summer foliage, skin tones, flash, grain. Put those things together properly and you get photographs with a bit of bite rather than everything melting into fifty shades of beige.
And thankfully, nobody appeared to have received the memo saying weddings have to be beige.
The photographs weren’t the main event
This is probably the bit I enjoyed most.
Milly and Jack weren’t spending their wedding day worrying about whether every photograph looked perfect. They were actually in it.
That changes everything.
People moved. People laughed. Things happened in the background. Guests weren’t constantly being rearranged into neat little formations. There was energy to work with rather than energy I had to manufacture.
My job was mostly to keep up with it.
That’s generally how I want to photograph a wedding anyway. I’ll step in when a bit of direction genuinely helps, particularly for portraits and family photographs, but the rest of the time I’d much rather watch what’s happening and make photographs from that.
The good stuff usually happens between the bits everyone planned.
Photographing Oakhill on 35mm film
I also shot part of Milly and Jack’s wedding on 35mm film.
I’m not interested in using film purely because it’s fashionable. I like it because it changes the rhythm slightly.
You get 36-ish frames. No firing ten photographs at the same moment. No checking the back of the camera afterwards. You choose when something deserves a frame and commit to it.
And when film sits alongside clean digital files, the slight grain, colour shifts and imperfections give the finished gallery another texture entirely.
For a place like Oakhill, with the greenery, old house, summer light and darker clothing, it made a lot of sense.
It also means their wedding gallery doesn’t feel like hundreds of versions of the same photograph. Digital does some things brilliantly. Film does others. I want both.
An Oakhill Cromford wedding with some actual energy
There are venues where the surroundings become the entire story.
Oakhill is beautiful, but what made this wedding work wasn’t simply having a nice Derbyshire venue behind everyone.
It was the people.
The black dresses helped. The gardens helped. August helped. The 35mm definitely helped.
But the photographs work because Milly, Jack and everybody around them gave me something real to photograph.
That’s always going to matter more than a perfectly arranged table.
And that’s the sort of wedding I’ll happily photograph all day long.
Planning a wedding at Oakhill Cromford?
If you’re getting married at Oakhill and you want photographs that feel more like being at your wedding than posing for it, you can have a look through my wedding portfolio.
I photograph weddings across Derbyshire and the UK, working mainly in a relaxed documentary style with digital and 35mm film.
Venue: Oakhill Cromford
Location: Cromford, Derbyshire
Date: 8 August 2026
Photography: Amarsi & Co
Photography format: Digital + 35mm film
