What we’ve been up to by Suffolk Wedding Photographers Hayley Denston Photography

As promised, here’s a little personal post and some photos for you before we go full-on into wedding season for us this year.

We’ve got lots of weddings and portraits in the diary over the next few months and we can’t wait to share lots of those days with you soon.

So, here’s a teeny-tiny snapshot of just a few of the things we’ve been up to over lockdown this year. We’ve enjoyed plenty of really lovely, long walks with our boys and have been to the coast lots when it was allowed again. As portraits and weddings haven’t been happening as normal our poor dogs have had far too many photos taken of them!

We’ve had time to work on the garden and have made some scaffold board beds and seats with areas for bugs and log piles built-in. We’ve planted up and weeded old flower beds and have created a whole new bed this year (photos before and after). I’ve taken hundreds of close up photos of plants and flowers (plus we’ve bought and split far too many plants!) … if anyone wants to see these just let me know and I’ll do a garden plants and photos post! We’ve created a new upcycled garden path from some patio paving slabs that were going to waste. Our growing veg has increased although, the courgette plants are currently producing so many, so fast, it appears we have marrows instead!

We’re lucky to have lots of different birds in the garden but our favourites have to be the bullfinches which are in for hours every day.

In the house, we’ve done a fair bit of DIY and renovation work that’s been long overdue and put off by us for years. We’ve finally done our kitchen and dining room, downstairs toilet and one of the upstairs bedrooms. The downside to this is now the remaining rooms are looking overdue for updates so I think we’ve got the winter planned already when we have more time! I’ve learnt how to upcycle scaffold boards into shelving and now have these all over the place. I’ve upped my crocheting and have finished two bedspreads I wanted to make and I’ve started baking at least a couple of times a week and have learnt how to make many biscuits, cakes, jam tarts, scones and bread … although I think this will now be reduced over the next few months as work increases.

We’ve also upcycled a lot of furniture pieces we’ve found on gumtree which has been fun (I’ve put a photo on of the bureau we picked up which was white and we painted black and gold).

On the photography side of things we’ve got a new camera (which is insanely good in low light), a few new lenses and a whole load of new batteries and memory cards …. we’re enjoying working with these and the options they open up for not using flash (we much prefer working with light as it is in the majority of cases although sometimes you do have to use flash when you can’t see a thing!). The photos below are a mix of ‘proper’ camera photos and then just the lower quality phone ones (as we don’t take the good cameras out and about with us when we’re walking).

Anyhow, I could probably chat to you about what we’ve been up to for a while but I really should get back to my editing as I’m currently processing the most gorgeous wedding with the loveliest of couples that I can’t wait to share with you.

Bye for now and I’ll be back sharing again soon x