We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sarah and Darren Hendry a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Sarah and Darren, appreciate you joining us today. We love asking folks what they would do differently if they were starting today – how they would speed up the process, etc. We’d love to hear how you would set everything up if you were to start from step 1 today.

We started out in wedding photography with the notion that we had to conform to a certain way of shooting because it was a couple’s special day and they needed photography that was traditional and fit the usual standards. But boy were we so wrong! We wasted time shooting like that and completely cheated on ourselves and the overall quirky style started out with in other aspects of photography (non-weddings). We should have just been ourselves from the get-go, therefore standing out from the very (saturated) photography crowd and having more creative folks book our services. But we got lost in an ocean of identical photography styles and we struggled for a while…

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Our journey into the world of wedding photography started back in 2011. Prior to that, we were shooting portraits, music shows and architectural stuff (Darren has a degree in Architecture) as a hobby, and we were starting to get slightly bored, not to mention, our lack of creativity was failing us. We randomly put a photography advert on Gumtree (UK version of Craigslist!) and secured our first ever paid booking after a few days, which happened to be a wedding which we were a little surprised about since that type of photography had never really interested us! Since then, we have never looked back and have been doing wedding photography full-time for 10 years now. Not something we ever planned on doing, but it just worked out like that! It sounds slightly clichéd but getting to travel the world and meet loads of new people along the way has been totally inspiring, and ultimately changed the way we were as people. We have since been evolving creatively every day and this way of thinking has kept our minds fresh and our eyes wide open, and we’re always looking for new ways to express ourselves with our imagery. Now we have no problem with stepping out of our creative boundaries and changing it up at every wedding or shoot we’re part of. We hope this is the thing that sets us apart from others! One lesson we still need to learn is to quit being so self-conscious about ourselves and our work, and not compare ourselves to our peers and the people within our industry. It’s a tough ol’ thing to master, but we’re slowly getting there!

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

Honestly, standing out from the crowd and doing something a bit different from the norm! We like to be as creative as possible on all weddings and shoots we take on and strongly believe that once your creativity starts to lag and you become complacent in what you do, you end up not being as passionate, which, in turn, negatively impacts your work. So we keep pushing ourselves creatively and strive to constantly come up with new ideas to keep bettering ourselves and our work. This will ensure that we keep loving what we do for years to come!

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

We both met in 2005 at a random music show back in Scotland! We both had a passion for music and photography so made a true connection through those things! We photographed a few shows together which then led to some random portrait sessions, eventually manifesting into our first wedding. We’re both very creative people who share many completely different ideas and visions, so our variety of strengths really complement each other, which has been super helpful throughout this journey together!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://thehendrys.co
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_hendrys
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thehendrysimages

Image Credits
The Hendrys