Dealing with disappointment

After a shoot, the mind can sometimes fixate on the shots that you didn’t take. How can photographers make sense of that sinking feeling?

- Paul Wilkinson

How are you feeling?” The groom asked me, as he showed me around the wedding venue on the morning of the big day.

“I’m so excited about today,” I started to respond. I should’ve stopped there. Instead, as a perpetual oversharer, I continued.

“But I also know I’m going to be so disappointed tomorrow when I think about all the photographs I didn’t capture.”

We were at Wells Cathedral, arguably the most beautiful of all the UK’s cathedrals, and a renowned movie and television show backdrop.

The tiny city surrounding it is the stuff of magazines: cobbled streets, picturesque arches and postcard-perfect scenes everywhere you turn, including what’s thought to be the best-preserved 14th century residential street in Europe.

I could’ve spent a week there and I would still run out of time to create all the images that flooded into my imagination as I looked around. But as always with weddings, today’s portraits would be created under the pressure of time. There would be an afternoon ceremony, an early evening meal and, of course, hundreds of guests wanting to spend time with the happy couple.