Brooklodge Wedding Photography | Claire and Cormac

Weddings at Brooklodge have always held something extra for me. I married my own husband Kevin in Macreddin Chapel, so every time we photograph a wedding together on that estate it carries a little of our own day with it. There's a particular warmth I feel walking that avenue in autumn. I'm biased, and I'm not sorry about it.

Claire and Cormac's wedding was the kind that makes you feel like someone granted you a wish. If I had been handed a list of ingredients for a perfect wedding day and told to design it from scratch, I would have come up with something very close to this. A laid-back couple completely at ease with each other and everyone around them. A ring bearer dog taking his responsibilities very seriously. Flower girls fizzing with excitement from the moment they arrived. An intimate humanist ceremony with the kind of warmth and laughter that only comes when the words have been written specifically for two specific people.

Outside, Brooklodge in October was doing everything autumn is supposed to do. The ivy had turned, deep red climbing the stone walls, the kind of colour that makes you want to stop and just look at it for a while. The light was low and golden and generous. We had all of it.

The speeches were everything good wedding speeches should be — heartfelt and funny in the same breath, full of the specific details that make a room laugh and cry almost simultaneously. The parents, as they always do, felt everything the most. You could see it in them.

And then Harlequin took the floor in Brookhall and did what Harlequin always do — transformed the room into something looser and warmer and wonderfully hazy. The kind of atmosphere that a documentary wedding photographer waits for all day. The kind you can feel even in a photograph.