About
I am Aisling.
I photograph weddings and families in Galway, and I have done it full time since the year I stopped teaching art in a secondary school in Renmore.
I work quietly. At a wedding you will notice me twice: once when I ask everybody out of the room while the dress goes on, and once for the twenty minutes of family groups. The rest of the day I am somewhere at the back with a long lens, and the photographs you like best afterwards will almost all be from a moment you do not remember me being there for.
I do not own a photo booth, I do not shoot video, and I do not do corporate headshots. There are people in this city who are better at all three than I would be.
How I work
Four things that are true of every wedding I photograph.
Natural light, almost always.
Two bodies, a 35mm and an 85mm, both fast. Flash comes out for the band and nothing else. A stone church at four on a November afternoon is dark, and the answer to that is a wide aperture and a steady hand, not a flashgun in the face of an eighty year old aunt.
The rules of the building come first.
I ring the sacristan or the venue coordinator the week before and ask exactly where I may stand and whether flash is allowed. Nobody has ever been annoyed to be asked, and I have never been moved on during a ceremony.
Family groups are a list, not an improvisation.
Send me the list beforehand and give a copy to a brother or a bridesmaid who can recognise the names. Ten groups at three minutes each is thirty minutes, and doing it without a list is an hour and somebody in tears.
You see everything.
The full gallery, not a curated forty. I remove the frames where somebody is blinking or eating and nothing else, because the one you want is never the one I would have picked.
The second shooter
Marta Kowalczyk has worked with me since 2021. She is with the groom and his people while I am with the bride, and she is at the back of the church covering the aisle from the other side. On the Full Day collection she is there for four hours.
Insurance and the paperwork
Public liability to €6.5 million. Most Galway hotels ask a supplier for the certificate about a month out and I send it directly to them. Prices include VAT at 23 per cent, and there is one invoice, not three.
Where I go
Galway city, Connemara, Clare, Mayo and south Sligo with no travel charge. Beyond ninety kilometres there is a mileage line at fifty cent a kilometre, and a room if the ceremony is before eleven in the morning.
The honest version.
I am not the cheapest photographer in Galway and I am not the most expensive. I take about eighteen weddings a year because that is how many I can edit properly, and when the Saturdays in June and September are gone they are gone by the previous autumn.
If you have read this far you already know whether it sounds like the kind of photographs you want. Tell me your date and I will tell you straight away whether I have it.