← All confessions · Weddings 2026-10-24

Four Flashes in the Photo Booth

Fourteen weddings of bickering with the photographer. At the fifteenth, the photo booth caught everything.

How it started

Fourteen weddings. That's how many times I'd worked alongside Theo, the photographer every couple in town seems to book, and fourteen times he'd moved my carefully placed centrepieces 'for the light.' I'm a wedding planner. I run timelines to the minute. He runs on vibes and espresso. We bickered over golden hour, over the first-dance spotlight, over who got the last vegetarian plate at staff dinner. At wedding fifteen, a vineyard affair with three hundred guests, the bride had hired a vintage photo booth and asked me to test it before the doors opened. Theo slid in beside me 'to check the flash.' The curtain fell shut. The booth started counting down from three. Neither of us moved to stop it.

Then it happened

Four flashes. In the first strip we're glaring at each other. In the second we're laughing. By the third his hand is on my cheek, and the fourth is very much a kiss, the kind that makes a velvet curtain look like a terrible privacy decision. We stepped out flushed, straightened our lanyards and went back to work like total professionals. What I didn't know was that the booth printed two copies. The second dropped straight into the guest book tray.

The morning after

The bride found it during the speeches and read the strip aloud like breaking news. Three hundred guests cheered. My assistant made it her phone wallpaper. The groom's mother asked for our business card, singular. Theo now books every wedding I plan, and he still moves my centrepieces. I've stopped putting them back.