Natural History Museum Wedding

What a dream come true – to photograph a Natural History Museum wedding; their Hintze Hall is truly an iconic space and an utterly spectacular background for a wedding. Kieran and Aman’s Sikh wedding fit right into that category – although the event itself was amazing and fairly high octane – with dancers, dhol drummers and the rest, they wanted their wedding photography to be low key, natural and documentary – which is where I came in.

Sikh wedding ceremony

The wedding ceremony itself was at the Letchworth Gurdwara, earlier in the day, before an extensive break, an outfit change and an epic arrival down the stairs into the Hall for the reception. Dancing, feasting and games all followed, and I can’t believe that this lucky photographer got to be part of a Natural History Museum wedding.

More about Natural History Museum weddings

Although the Hintze Hall is probably the most famous space at the museum, there are a number of others that are available for weddings including the modern Darwin Centre space (which is where Aman & Kieran’s guests entered), Fossil Way, which is the corridor with the ichthyosaur fossils and the giant sloth, as well as Earth Hall, which boasts a giant escalator heading into a replica of the earth.

Hire prices are all bespoke, as you might imagine!

A note for photographers

If you’ve stumbled across this post looking for information on what the lighting might be like at a Natural History Museum wedding, there’s a bit of insight below the images.

Before Aman & Kieran’s wedding I knew that lighting this incredible space would be a challenge – we often talk about cavernous spaces and high ceilings at venues making it difficult to use bounce flash, but this is another level – the space is huge. Add to that the fact that weddings can only start from 7pm, since the museum is open to the public until 6pm, so it’s often going to be dark too. I used a mix of bounce flash, video light and ambient light, since the action was too fast moving for off camera flash to be reliable – that would probably be different if you were shooting with a team, but in this case it was just me. I created an Instagram highlight all about how I tackled this which you can view here. If you’re interested in learning more about flash photography in general, then you can check out my course Learn to Light.

It’s also worth knowing that I second shot a wedding there with a pal again recently, and on that occasion, the lighting company did a clean daylight balanced spot light on speakers, as the couple came down the stairs and for the first dance and we barely needed flash at all – so investing in the right kind of lighting is really important.

Ellie Gillard is a London wedding photographer, specialising in documentary, alternative photography, and capturing weddings in joyful colour.

To see more of my portfolio, click here