This was a full day of coverage in Chennai, and it is the kind of wedding we most like to photograph: busy, unposed, and full of people who have known each other for decades.
Start on the street
The morning procession happens outside, in ordinary traffic, with neighbours watching from doorways. Those frames set the whole gallery in a place. If you begin inside the hall you lose that entirely.
The thali is the one frame you cannot miss
Everything else on a wedding day can be photographed again from another angle. The tying of the thali cannot. We work it with two bodies — one tight on the hands, one wide enough to hold the family pressing in around the couple — and we agree the positions with the priest beforehand.
Photograph the room, not just the couple
Half of what a family wants back in ten years is the grandmother laughing at something off-frame, or the cousins crowding a doorway. We shoot for that as deliberately as we shoot the rituals.