Sikh Wedding Photographer in Baldock

Serving Baldock

Photographing Sikh weddings across Baldock

Baldock is a historic Hertfordshire market town. Country houses, community centres and gurdwara complexes across Hertfordshire all appear in our Sikh wedding work, and many of them sit within easy reach of Letchworth, Hitchin and Royston. Karah parshad closes the anand karaj, and we photograph the warm handfuls being shared down the rows, one of the small moments couples are always glad to have kept.

Both households get covered on the wedding morning when you book a second photographer, so the sehra bandi and the bride's final preparations are told at the same time rather than one after the other. Movement in the darbar hall is kept slow and predictable, so neither the granthi nor your elders are ever startled by a photographer darting past. Each laav follows the last with its own rhythm, and we move gently between two or three agreed positions so all four walks around the Guru Granth Sahib are covered.

There is a lot to like about Baldock for a Sikh wedding. Baldock is a historic Hertfordshire market town, and the wider area, Royston and Rickmansworth among it, is somewhere we photograph regularly. Venues we have photographed at near Baldock include Letchworth Hall Hotel and Milling Barn.

Baldock is a historic Hertfordshire market town founded by the Knights Templar in the twelfth century where the Great North Road crossed the Icknield Way. Baldock station is on the Cambridge to London King's Cross line, and the A1(M) runs close to the town. For portraits away from the celebration, Weston Hills nature reserve and the chalk downland countryside surrounding the town works beautifully, and The Church of St Mary the Virgin, with a chancel dating from the thirteenth century adds a real sense of place.

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Every Sikh ritual

The ceremony, shabad by shabad

Anand Sahib is recited near the close of the ceremony, and we use those minutes for the hall as a whole, the rows of relatives, the children at the front, the light on the rumalla. As the bride's brothers and cousins stand at each corner for the laavan, we photograph their steadying hands, a detail of the anand karaj that families treasure years later. As each laav is sung, you rise and walk the circle together, and we hold our position so the palla, the bowed heads and the listening families all sit clearly in the frames.

We photograph the sehra bandi as the last quiet chapter of the groom's morning, the turban finished, the sehra tied and the mother's blessing before the noise of the baraat begins. During the choora ceremony we photograph the red and ivory bangles being slipped on by your maternal uncle, the blessings of the family and the tears that usually arrive with them. Bhangra circles form and dissolve all evening, and we work from inside them, low and close, because a photograph taken from the edge of a dance floor never carries the noise.