What to Look For When Hiring a Wedding Car?

Your wedding day is certainly the most important day in your life, and you want it to pass flawlessly, without any blunders. Hiring the finest wedding car for this day is as critical as selecting the perfect dress. Here are some tips to help you find the ideal wedding car hire in Manchester.

Consider the Overall Journey

It is imperative to first think of the pick-up points as well as the people who will be in the vehicles. How many flower girls, pageboys, and bridesmaids will you have? This is to determine the exact number of vehicles you will need.

If you are considering hiring a traditional car, you can pick a classic seven seat Daimler Limousine, for example. You can also ask a relative or friend to help you with any bulk luggage as not all vehicles have adequate storage space.

Think of the Car Colour and Model

Nowadays, wedding car hire firms ensure that they list all cars they have in their list of rentals. If you want to hire a wedding car for the bride-to-be, you should keep in mind her favourite car model and colour. You can also consider hiring a car that compliments your wedding venue's theme. If the theme colour of the wedding is blue, for instance, then you should book a car in the colour that compliments that theme.

Consider Being Classic

Luxury radiates from quite a few models that include the classic limousine. Most people prefer these models over any other car as wedding transportation. Other than the classic limousine, you can also shop around for cars that are regarded as ‘sophisticated' or ‘elegant'.

Examine the Vehicle

Some vehicle models are used regularly with minimal maintenance. Hence, they are fragile and unworthy of hire. It is advisable to always examine the car before making any payments. A wedding car is a reflection of affluence and class; you cannot afford to choose the wrong vehicle.

Compare the Options

There are many wedding car hire companies out there. Thus, you need to compare their charges and offerings. With the stiff competition, you will have a wide range of options with regard to the major models in wedding cars, from which you can make your choice. You can shop around for different companies, noting down their offers. Afterwards, you will compare the mdels and select the ideal model that fits your needs and budget.

Check for Insurance and Security

You need to look for a well-established wedding car hire company with fully licensed chauffeurs. Also, ensure that the firm has public liability insurance. Be careful not to select one of those hobbyist wedding operators out there, who don't operate as proper businesses.

Survey the Vehicle Interior

Wedding cars ought to have a sparkling, comfortable and magnificent interior for your relaxation while enjoying the ride. There are wedding hire companies that provide extra services and accompaniments like customised ribbons with the wedding couple's names, soft drinks, water, as well as free champagne. Take this into consideration when looking for a wedding car hire.

Conclusion

The wedding day is naturally the most cherished day in a person's life. This is why everyone would go to great lengths to make the day as great as they can possibly imagine, including hiring the finest wedding transport. To those looking for wedding car hire in Manchester, you have no cause to worry. Opulence Executive Travels, a Truly Great Luxury Car Company, offers a wide range of prestigious vehicles from which you can choose the one that perfectly fits your taste and budget.

Wedding industry gives same-sex marriages a mixed reception

More than 15,000 same-sex marriages have taken place in England and Wales since it became legal to do so, but the wedding industry still has far to go in catering for them, say experts.

There were 7,366 ceremonies for couples not already in a civil partnership, and 7,732 who converted their existing civil partnership into marriage, according to the Office of National Statistics. Yet as the business around same-sex marriage grows, there was criticism that the wedding industry as a whole has been slow to respond to this lucrative market.

“It is still waking up. There is a long way to go,” said Gino Meriano, founder of gayweddingshow.co.uk, which organised six gay wedding fairs across the UK last year. “If two women go into a bridal shop, do not assume one is the bride and one is the chief bridesmaid. Which happens. A lot,” he added.

Since the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act was introduced on 29 March 2014, with the first ceremonies taking place moments after midnight, 15,098 same-sex couples legally married during the period up to 30 June 2015, with 55% of ceremonies being between women, and 45% between men.

The number of civil partnerships fell by 70%, from 5,646 in 2013 to 1,683 in 2014. In December 2014, just 58 civil partnerships were carried out.

Laura Metayer, who founded Mrs & Mrs Products, specialising in same-sex wedding cards, invitations, personalised gifts and cake toppers, started her website four years ago when she and her partner had a civil partnership “because we couldn’t find any products ourselves”.

Today, business is booming, she said. “We specialise in things specifically for same-sex marriages. One of our new products is congratulations cards that say “to our daughter and daughter-in-law” or “son and son-in-law”. Even “sister and sister-in-law”. We have had some card companies make them up specially for us and they have sold really well. Especially to parents, as they like to get something special for their children,” she said.

“This has been our best year. Most of our business comes from guests rather then the couple themselves.

“We have done gay wedding fairs and have contacts with a lot of other people in the industry, and I think it has definitely increased.”

Gay wedding planner Petra Truneckova, who has published a guide to same-sex weddings, said: “The market is getting bigger and bigger. It’s virgin territory and I think we are creating a gay wedding etiquette right now.

“I love the creativity. There is much more flexibility. You can have the grooms entering the room together. You can have so many different options, which is what I like. And the magic is you have room to create.”

She is now expanding her business to promote destination weddings for gay couples. “Especially gay men. They tend to have a bigger budget, and are travelling more, and generally don’t have children, and are bigger spenders than straight couples,” she said.

“The market, generally, all around the world, is increasing a lot. It is a millionaire industry now,” she added. “I wouldn’t be opening my markets and expanding if that was not the case.”

But, she cautioned, the wedding industry still discriminated against same-sex couples by often using terms such as “bridal suite”, “bridal car”, “bridal favours” and “bridal party” in their literature. The terminology needed to be updated, said Truneckova, founder of Bellus Events.

“Many venues are still using these terms, and then the two grooms get really upset. I get that constantly. Wording is really important,” she added, saying she always checked such details before forwarding on to her clients.

The ONS figures showed the number of same-sex marriages peaked at 844 in the month of August last year. “Historically the most popular time for marriages to take place is during the summer months, with ceremonies being less popular in winter, “ the ONS said. “Marriages of same-sex couples are following this seasonal pattern.”

The majority of those who wed a partner of the same gender had never been married or in a civil partnership before. Just over 14% of women and 8% of men had been divorced. The ONS said: “The majority, if not all of these previous marriages, will have been with a partner of the opposite sex.”

According to a survey by marketing and research company Out Now Consulting, a total of 868,000 gay men and lesbians in the UK are expected to marry over the next 15 years. Taking an average of £20,983 per ceremony, “that implies the UK gay and lesbian weddings market to be worth £18.2bn during the next 15 years”, CEO Ian Johnson said.

Meriano, whose company produces Pink Weddings magazine, distributed at the gay wedding fairs he arranges, said the indications were that there would not be a dramatic rise in the number of same-sex weddings. The market was worth an estimated £570m between 2005 and 2013, before the legalisation of same-sex marriage, and an estimated £62m in 2013, he said.

“The wedding industry is five or six years behind,” he added. “Many of those who exhibit at the gay wedding fairs do not have products specific to same-sex weddings. It’s got to wake up,” he added.

Anti-gay marriage Oregon bakery defies state order to pay damages to couple

The owners of a Portland-area bakery are refusing to pay $135,000 in state-ordered damages to a same-sex couple who were denied service, despite a crowdfunding effort on their behalf having raised more than $500,000.

Melissa and Aaron Klein, owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa, cited religious beliefs when they refused to bake a wedding cake for Laurel and Rachel Bowman-Cryer more than two years ago.

State labor commissioner Brad Avakian awarded the damages in July for emotional suffering, saying the owners had violated the women’s civil rights by discriminating on the basis of their sexual orientation.

The Kleins have filed an appeal of the ruling and are defying the order to pay. They are claiming financial hardship despite the crowdfunding efforts on their behalf, the Oregonian newspaper reported.

The couple closed the Gresham store in 2013 and now operate the business from home.

“It’s difficult to understand the Kleins’ unwillingness to pay the debt when they have, very publicly, raised nearly a half million dollars,” state labor bureau spokesman Charlie Burr told the Oregonian in an email Wednesday.

“They are entitled to a full and fair review of the case, but do not have the right to disregard a legally binding order.”

A lawyer for the Kleins, Anna Harmon, told the Oregonian she couldn’t comment about her clients’ actions, citing the ongoing litigation.

A 2007 Oregon law protects the rights of gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people in employment, housing and public accommodations. It provides an exemption for religious organizations, but the agency ruled that exemption does not allow private businesses to discriminate against potential customers.

Love, marriage … and a barrage of shoes

Shoe-throwing may now be mostly a political act. But not long ago, it was a common rite of marriage, writes James Crombie of Aberdeen, who has gathered some matrimonial footwear-hurling facts into a 24-page treatise called Shoe-Throwing at Weddings.

This was in 1895, when readers may have empathised with Crombie’s opening thought: “Pelting a bride and bridegroom with old shoes when they start on their honeymoon is a custom we are all familiar with, and in which many of us have participated.”

Some 113 years later, in 2008, Muntazer al-Zaidi recategorised the social role of shoe-throwing when he hurled size-10 shoes, and some words (“This is your farewell kiss, you dog”), at US president George W Bush at a press conference in Baghdad.

Crombie’s article is pretty apolitical, and makes no bows to podiatrical correctness. Though his paper was published in the journal Folklore, Crombie was no worshipper of footloose or flighty tales. He helped establish the first seismological observatory in the Aberdeen area and was a generous donor to Oxford Observatory.

Crombie writes that around the world lots of people make a practice of throwing something at newlyweds. Rice, especially, has had wide popularity.

Victorians put their best foot forward in the choice of missile, Crombie writes: “For whereas we find the custom of throwing rice, or some other cereal, prevalent in almost every land, we find shoe-throwing practised mainly, I think, in those parts of the world inhabited by Englishmen or directly influenced by them, among the wandering Gypsies of Transylvania, some parts of India, and one or two other places.”

Nuptial bombardment is meant to induce luck, he says. Sometimes it summons more than luck. Crombie points to the large Indonesian island of Celebes (now called Sulawesi). “At South Celebes,” he writes, “rice is thrown on the head of anyone in whose honour a festival is held, with the object of detaining the soul, which at such times is in especial danger of being lured away by envious demons.”

Shoes, he writes, are sometimes essential wedding elements even when hand-delivered rather than heaved – especially in Germany and Finland. “According to a sumptuary law of Hamburg, enacted in 1291, the bridegroom was bound to present the bride with a pair. They almost played the part of our engagement ring and were, as it were, evidence of betrothal.”

And in his own era, in east Finland, Crombie says, a mother-in-law would not permit her new son-in-law to bed his bride until the young man had presented the mother-in-law with a pair of shoes.

Shoes, he tells us, can also be essential, symbolically, at the end of a marriage. “A Bedouin form of divorce,” Crombie reports, is, “she is my slipper, I have cast her off.”

Picture perfect: how to make it as a wedding photographer

Experiment with interesting angles and risky compositions, says wedding photographer Steven Rooney. Photograph: Steven Rooney

 Not so long ago, the wedding photographer was the man in the smart suit with the flashy camera who lined the families up – the bride’s, the groom’s, then all together – outside the church door. His work was concentrated in a fleeting window of about half an hour, reeling off as many shots as possible before the guests began to groan. Then, with the cutting of the cake, his responsibilities ended and well before the dancing was over he could be back home.

The early 21st century wedding photographer bears little resemblance to this old caricature. Today they work within a fast-growing, highly competitive, dynamic industry, straining to portray the wedding day in their own unique style. Some work like photojournalists, gliding invisibly between the guests, looking for candid moments. Others choreograph scenes with all the sophistication of film directors, capturing shimmering dresses, leaping groomsmen or epic backdrops.

Meanwhile, the barrier to entry remains low. Anyone with a camera can set themselves up as a wedding photographer and pitch to one of the quarter of a million couples getting married in England and Wales each year, part of an industry across the whole UK that is worth an estimated £10bn. The lure of the money, the freedom of the job and the scope for turning a hobby into a business ensures that the sector is a competitive one. So what does it take to succeed?

Steven Rooney, a wedding photographer from Southport, has watched the evolution of the profession. As a boy, he learned his craft from his grandfather, a teacher who used to photograph weddings in his spare time. Those times with his grandfather’s Canon AE1 camera and Ilford black and white film were the genesis of Rooney’s career. Though originally trained as a teacher, he kept up his photography and one day a friend asked him to shoot his wedding. It was the stepping stone into a career that has seen him become one of the north-west’s leading wedding photographers.

The support of his friends and family has been key to Rooney’s success. His brother designed his first website, a friend who worked for an accounting firm helped him to set up as a limited company and then his wife, Sally, joined him. She takes care of the admin for what is now a family business. “She holds our business together,” Rooney says. “She’s much more organised than me, she also designs the albums, runs the house and looks after the kids while I’m shooting weddings.”

Rooney’s business expanded slowly. It was a gradual slide into weddings rather than a sudden move from teaching. For Rooney this was important as he could build his portfolio steadily, picking the assignments that interested him. “I followed American photographers like Jeff Newsom and began to develop a client base of people who liked my style. There are lots of different techniques: double exposures, long exposures, pictures of stars, painting with light.”

Business is also going from strength to strength for Ann-Kathrin Koch, a Birmingham-based, German wedding photographer. Koch has a reputation for beautiful documentary shots, a style of visual storytelling that she puts down to her training as a freelance film editor.

Like Rooney, Koch built her business gradually. “I was able to do both the film editing and the wedding photography for quite a long time,” she says. “I had started out with photography in my early 20s, using websites like Flickr. The community back then was all about Flickr and I would take pictures of everything around me and post them. It also got me interested in how others did what they did.”

Social media was not just a training ground for Koch, but also a source of clients during her first year as a wedding photographer in 2011. She says: “I did a handful of weddings that year – friends and connections through Flickr. I then started to blog about everything I was doing – mostly it was about photography, but it was not exclusively about weddings.”

In 2012, she went full-time and shot 26 weddings. Since then the numbers have continued to rise; Koch sets herself apart by using a Hasselblad H2 film camera and medium format film, and benefits from an growing digital profile and word of mouth recommendations. Last year, she travelled 33,531 miles through 13 different countries.

It is intensive work. Katrina Otter, a wedding and event planner, points out that there is so much more involved for photographers than before. “They are really involved in the planning process. Often they meet me or the couples beforehand to plan how they’re going to tell the story of the day. Then they have to work in different environments and adapt quickly to changes in conditions – the light or the weather.”

Both Rooney and Koch acknowledge the importance of making this connection with the couples prior to the wedding. It’s part of the hidden work a wedding photographer does. Rooney explains, “When someone enquires, I speak to them about the wedding. I think this is very important. We meet up at their house or we find a cafe. More often than not we get on, and we talk about the day.”

But, Rooney explains, that is just the first part of the process. He adds: “People often say, ‘This is a nice job, what do you do for the rest of the week?’ They don’t realise that afterwards you go home, back up the cards, back up the backup and render the files, chose which to edit, then spend about 10 hours editing before uploading them into a gallery or a slideshow and getting back to the couple.”

It’s a workload that aspiring wedding photographers might underestimate, and it’s also one of great responsibility. Rooney admits to taking a backup of his photographs on holiday for the sheer terror of losing them. Another common pitfall is being asked by friends to work for free. Koch cautions against this: “The most important thing to remember is that it’s a business you’re running, and not a hobby anymore. If you are running it as a hobby you’ll always lose out in the end. It’s not a sustainable business that way.”

Far from being an added-extra, for Otter, the wedding photographer is an essential part of the day: “On my planning list it is pretty much top of the list after the venue. I have so many friends who have decided to save on their photographer so they can put more towards the dress, the alcohol or the food and they really regretted it afterwards. You will always notice your wedding photos, much more than you’ll look back at your shoes.”

Ann-Kathrin Koch trained as a film editor Photograph: Ann-Kathrin Koch

Here are five wedding photography from Steven Rooney:

1) Practice - a lot. Take your camera everywhere with you until you know it inside and out and can use the dials and buttons without looking.

2) Always have backups and spares. Spare cameras and lenses, disc drives and backups of your work. When you pay the bills with your camera you can’t risk anything going wrong.

3) Charge what you’re worth and work out what your income and outgoings are to be to make sure you’re earning what you should. A good accountant can really help with this.

4) Try, fail and improve. In order to be unique and stay creative try different things, interesting angles and risky compositions. Be yourself and develop your own style.

5) Keep in touch with other photographers. It can be a lonely job sometimes but there are some great photographers who are happy to help you along the way, from social media groups to official organisations, networks and training courses.