My daughter, Amelia, turned eleven this January. During the February school half-term break we embarked on a grand adventure together, spending a week in Iceland. The decision to make Iceland the location for this adventure had been triggered by our seeing Nichola & Marcus’s photographs and videos from a trip they had taken to the country last February, in particular those featuring Marcus’s proposal to Nichola on the shore of the glacier lagoon at Jökulsárlón. Our trip would also coincide with Nichola & Marcus returning to Iceland to marry, with a ceremony at Búðir Church in the Búðahraun lava fields in Staðarsveit and a visit a few days later to Jökulsárlón, to the very spot that they had first become engaged. Nichola & Marcus asked me to photograph these two occasions and as she would be my assistant, Amelia suggested that I buy her a camera for her eleventh birthday. So I did; a nice little compact camera with enough in the way of features for her to grow in to. As yet I’ve provided her with no direct instruction in photography, made no attempt to influence choice of subject matter, composition or timing; I was keen to see how she would work her way into using the medium and all that I have shown her is how to charge the battery in her new camera. Everything else she has thus far worked out for herself.

Every photograph in this blog post was taken by her. Originally I’d had it in mind to include a few of her images alongside my own when it came time for me to blog this wedding. When I saw what she had produced though, I knew immediately that I wanted to give her work a blog post of its own. I am amazed by what she has created. I’m thrilled to have this new insight into the way that she sees the world. I was impressed by her professionalism, calmness and perseverance throughout and am immeasurably proud of her for this and for all that she is.

I sense that it might well be me assisting her at some point in the not too distant future!

Thanks to Nichola & Marcus for having us both along for their Iceland wedding and for the world of wonder that it introduced us to. I’ll be back in time with my own take on the adventure but for now, this is the story of Nichola & Marcus’s Iceland wedding, through the eyes of Amelia.