Last Wednesday I had the pleasure of attending the Best of Bury St Edmunds annual birthday party at the Ickworth Hotel.

Ickworth Hotel is just outside Bury St Edmunds in the lovely village of Horringer. Recently they underwent a change in management and the new team there are doing a fantastic job! All the guests at the birthday bash were treated to amazing canapés and champaign on their arrival.

For those planning a wedding, the Ickworth Hotel is a great place to start – it’s attached to the grand Ickworth House, which makes a stunning backdrop to your wedding photography. The staff, as I’ve already mentioned, are always happy to go out of their way to make sure that everything is perfect for your intimate wedding.

While last Wednesday had nothing to do with weddings, you know me, I love talking about my wedding photography!

Aside from a chance to meet up with other members of the Best of Bury St Edmunds (BOB) group and enjoy a few glasses of bubbly in lovely surroundings – it was also a chance for Miriam Howell, the owner of BOB and Michele Bailey to hand over awards to two local businesses. I was on hand to take some images of the evening.

The main award was for ‘Retailer of the year 2009′, which was awarded to Lily Daly of Lilyo.

Here are Miriam and Michele presenting Lily with her award – also pictured is Abby Hunt of St Nicholas Hospice Care

Lilyo is a shop on St Johns street in Bury St Edmunds which sells, amongst other gorgeous things, hand crafted pearl jewellery.

Congratulations to all those who were presented with awards!

Thank you again to all the staff at Ickworth Hotel.

If you are thinking of having a wedding at the Ickworth Hotel, then I’d love to chat with you about my amazing wedding photography!

It seems that not that long ago, a wedding photographer having a blog on his or hers website was something unusual, novel and interesting.

Then they exploded, along with Facebook accounts, Digg it buttons and the twittering of tweets. It seemed that everwhere you looked there was yet another wedding photographer who had a blog with one or two posts, a few pictures, and masses of buttons begging you to ‘follow me on <insert social networking of choice here>’.

It was very rare that these blogs actually had anything useful on them for a Bride and Groom to read. Mostly it was just another medium to post pictures on. Us photographers love that – something to post our pictures on – but we can also miss the point sometimes. If you are reading this blog post, you are, hopefully – for the sake of my business – a bride to be, or a lucky man who has had the woman of his dreams say yes to his proposal. Either way you are taking your first steps into a world that you most likely haven’t been part of before – PLANNING FOR YOUR WEDDING.

I’m sorry, didn’t mean to frighten you there!

You love your partner, you want to spend the rest of your life with them and for others to share in your love and happiness on your special day. For you your wedding is about this love and sense of occasion, and so it should be, but you are going to be dealing with businesses to make your special day a day to remember, and they are, well, they are businesses.

I’m hoping that by reading this blog you’ll get a better idea about what to look for when choosing, not only a wedding photographer, but also one of the many specialist suppliers who will help make your dreams become a reality on your wedding day.

Obviously the focus will be on photography, but along the way there will be plenty of hints and tips on how to make the planning of your wedding go as smoothly as possible which will allow you to enjoy the lead up to your big day rather than it be like work (ugh!).

Of course I’m still going to show you pictures, I mean after all, I am a photographer!

You’ll find plenty more examples of my images on my brand spanking new suffolk wedding photography site