A Wedding

Not mine, you understand.  Just a wedding ceremony we happen'd upon the other week when were out for a walk.  The Daffodil Garden, as it's affectionally known in these parts, is a little gem hidden away in the Southern Extremities of the University Campus.   The same University I used to work in - and in fact, my office was none too far from the Daffodil Garden.  I say was, as the whole of South Building was obliterated from the face of the Earth not long after I left.  Rather sad, as it was the first building of the New University of Ulster in the late '60s...the place I went to my first gig (The Stranglers) and home to Mandela Hall.  I wonder how many Universities had a 'Mandela Hall'?  Quite a few, I suspect... 

Still, The Daffodil Garden remains, even if Mandela Hall doesn't.  To the amusement of the locals, one of the first PhDs awarded in the New University of Ulster was on the subject of daffodils.  I'm not sure what the townspeople were expecting - perhaps research into sub-atomic particles or such-like but what they got was daffodils.  But to their credit, 50 years later The Daffodil Garden has become a place of pride amongst Coleraine folk.  It is a rather lovely place to walk around - and a favourite stop-off point for wedding photographs.   It was a beautiful autumn afternoon when we took a stroll, so sadly there weren't too many of the yellow things on show.  The walk was marred only by the fact we had to pass the pop-up drop-in COVID Testing Centre which has set up in the University...but I'm not dwelling on that bit of misery.

They wheeled - or perhaps drove, I'm not sure - the old Mini into place and then a small wedding party appeared.  From where I was standing the shot was contra-jour and the light was really rather nice.  It was, as they say, a moment in time - a few seconds later yer man had jumped off the bench and the party disappeared to the next thing on their busy schedule.   

Wedding Photographs in the Daffodil Garden, 2020.  Printed on Ilford MGV with a delicate cupric sulphate bleach and light sepia tone.

You'll need to click on it to see what the folk are up to.  This was taken with the 50mm Canon LTM lens on the M6 and although I printed it almost full-frame I did think about the composition, believe it or not.  I wanted that strong tree on the right to hold it all in and I also wanted to show as much of the gardens as possible...and then this little group of people doing their thing in one part of it.  The photographer standing on the bench makes it, I think.  I don't quite know what the bride and groom are supposed to be doing but we all need a bit of mystery in our photographs, right?