Tipi & Festival Wedding Photographer
Notes from a wedding photographer based on Exmoor
Some of my favourite weddings have happened in a field. A tipi or a stretch tent, a farm or a family garden, a bar in a horsebox and a band on a trailer, and two or three days of people camping, cooking and dancing with the weather doing whatever it likes. I’ve photographed tipi and festival-style weddings on farms in Somerset, Devon, Dorset and Wiltshire, from a tipi in the Herefordshire woods to a marquee on a Dorset farm to a farm on a Mendip hillside with its own yurts, and I’m based on Exmoor, where half the weddings are in a field anyway.
These are documentary weddings by nature. Nobody is on a schedule, nothing is staged, and the best pictures are the ones nobody planned: the kids in the hay bales, the sunset through the tent flap, the moment the band plays the song everyone was waiting for. I work in natural light, I keep the group photographs to ten minutes, and I stay late, because at a festival wedding the evening is the point.
What makes a tipi wedding photograph well
Space and light. A field at golden hour with a canvas tent glowing in the middle of it is one of the great wedding pictures and it happens by itself if you let the timings breathe: ceremony in the afternoon, food as the light goes soft, speeches as the sun sets, first dance in the dark with the fairy lights on. I’ll help you plan that so the sun does the work. The weather is the other thing; I’ve photographed tipi weddings in heatwaves and in sideways rain, and both make good pictures if you’ve a tent to retreat to and a photographer who doesn’t mind getting wet.
Tipi and farm weddings in pictures
Lapwing Farm, a Dorset farm, Woodcroft Farm in West Devon and a tipi in the trees.
Venues and places for a tipi or festival wedding
- Pennard Hill Farm, East Pennard: two fields, fourteen yurts and the Mendips as the view.
- Lapwing Farm, Shepton Mallet: a stone barn and a meadow looking at Glastonbury Tor.
- Country Ways, Umberleigh, and Eggbeer Farm near Exeter: farms with bell tents and no curfew.
- Your own field or a friend’s farm, with a tipi company bringing the tent; see farm and marquee weddings.
- Exmoor itself, where a marquee on the farm is the normal way to do it; see the Exmoor page.
Good to know
Generators and lighting. Festoon and fairy lights photograph beautifully; I don’t need you to add anything for me. Mud. I bring boots. Timings. The one thing I’ll ask for is the ceremony early enough to leave daylight for the portraits and the sun for the drinks. Travel. Somerset and Devon are home ground; nothing to add.
Taking a limited number of weddings for 2027 and 2028
If my way of working sounds like your kind of thing, I’d love to hear about your plans. Drop me a line with your date and venue and I’ll tell you straight away whether I’m free.
