About Us

About Beautiful Life

Our names are Shaun and Joy, we’re a husband and wife team and we love to tell stories using video and photography.

Shaun is the technical part of the outfit, a lover of all things mac.  He is also a chocolate loving wanna be fitness freak (he has all the apps but non of the action!)  Joy is the arty one, would be collector-maniac, lover of romance, the seaside and magazines with perfume samples built in.  We both have a keen sense of fun and believe life is amazing, surprising and challenging at times but fun, exciting and beautiful.  It is our passion and pleasure to capture our clients ‘best bits’.

We like to record peoples characters and personality as well as their brilliant smile.  At Weddings and events we work discreetly in a ‘fly on the wall’ kind of style with a focus on fun and creativity rather than formality.  We are passionate about capturing real moments and all the details that make your day unique.  Above all we want you to have an amazing day, to relax with your friends and family and enjoy everything because this is what makes for great wedding films and photographs.

As well as English weddings we also film and photograph Asian, Jewish and Greek weddings.

A bit about Me…

From being a small child I’ve always had an unquenchable need to cut, stick, paint and collect junk!  Through the years this has developed into a varied and colourful career working with lots of people groups using many different art forms.

The one experience that stands out as a defining moment for me was during my time working with kids in the care system.  I was asked to undertake a piece of work with three small children putting together a life-story book.  I worked with the children for 2 years on this project and spent hours, reading social work files, writing to relatives, hospitals and schools and interviewing significant people in their lives.  Together we had a brilliant time drawing, sticking, visiting places and taking photo’s but there was also great sadness for all the detail that had been lost over the years and many parts of their life story that were very sketchy and confused, so many significant moments that no-one had recorded were gone forever.  At the end of the two years it was a great pleasure to be able to hand over three beautiful books full of wonderful memories and precious information that brought a bit of order and significance to their otherwise hectic and neglected first few years of life.

This experience gave me a completely different view of the bits of old tat I’d collected on family holidays and the collection of old photos I’d shoved under the bed.  These things suddenly became some of my most treasured possessions, these tangible memories are the things that place me in history, that tell the world ‘I was here’ and someone obviously thought me important enough to record my best bits.

When I had my two little girls it became an obsession to record their characters unfolding I’ve got boxes of paintings, albums of photos and hours of video!!  Both my daughters constantly have pockets full of found objects and boxes of treasured ‘stuff’ I’m not allowed to get rid of.

One of their favorite pass-times (and mine!) is baking, especially the decorating part.  It’s a bit like painting and sticking but then you can eat it, Brilliant!!  My style of photography is a bit like baking, I have a general recipe in my head but then I like to see what ingredients people have in their cupboards and throw in a bit of this and that.  It maybe a favorite toy, a bright pair of wellies, an old chair or some textural old brickwork in the background, then of course there’s peoples unique characters and personalities.  Just like baking we mix the whole thing up and where you put the mixture in the oven and wait with much nervousness and anticipation of what’s going to be there when you open the door, it’s the same sort of feeling when you’ve shot the images and you load them onto your computer for editing and stylising into the final pictures.

Each picture is a glimpse into a story, and my passion as a photographer is to capture all the emotion, colours and detail of the moment so that these memories can be enjoyed and treasured for many years to come.

What a brilliant job I have!!

My Favorite things…

One way of getting an idea of someone’s style is to look at what interests them, what are they passionate about? heres my top ten in no particular order:

Magazines with perfume samples built in so the pages smell delish, it reminds me of the dawn of scratch and sniff notebooks and stickers when I was a kid.

Pick and Mix, I am a definite fan of jelly snakes and flying saucers I have the fillings to proove it!

New products of any kind, cleaning stuff, face creams, breakfast cereals, biscuits, whatever’s new I have to try it. (This week we bought Marmite cheese, love it or hate it? my youngest daughter is a big fan, personally I think it stinks!!)

Anything girly, barbies, my little ponies, anything pink.  This stems from a deprived childhood of pass-me-down clothes and bikes usually from my cousin who’s a boy!!

Lauren child books, her illustrations bring the whole story to life and her writing is just fantastic.

Obviously my kids, specifically their great imaginations and all the times the funny things they say bring a smile to my face.

The seaside, I love walking along the tide line collecting bits for textile projects, I love fish and chips and the game in the arcade where you race camels (you can now get this for the wii!)

Period dramas, especially Larkrise to Candleford so romantic!!

Autumn, I love the colours but I also love the fact that the days are getting shorter and bonfire night and Christmas are just around the corner.

Buttons, I’m always saving them, I don’t know what for.