Mathilde and Bendik’s Villa Catignano Wedding in Tuscany
Some weddings take a little while to reveal themselves. When I started photographing Mathilde and Bendik on their wedding day at Villa Catignano, they were both slightly shy around the cameras. There was no elaborate photography brief waiting for me, though. They had already spent time looking through my work and essentially told me that they trusted what I did and wanted me to do my thing. For a wedding photographer, that kind of trust changes everything. Instead of spending the day trying to manufacture moments, I could move around, observe and wait for the real ones.
Mathilde and Bendik had travelled from Norway to celebrate their wedding in Tuscany, with friends and family arriving from Norway and different corners of Europe. By the end of the day, the quietness of those first photographs had turned into something completely different: guests dancing around the garden, Bendik being launched into the air by his friends, napkins flying above the dinner tables and a party that became increasingly difficult, and increasingly fun, to predict. I photographed the whole wedding using a mixture of digital photography and 35mm analogue film.
A Norwegian Wedding in the Tuscan Countryside
There was one small complication for me throughout the day: everyone was speaking Norwegian. I don’t speak Norwegian. That meant I couldn’t rely on conversations to tell me when something important was about to happen. I couldn’t hear a sentence developing and realise that it was leading towards a joke, a toast or an emotional reaction.
So I watched instead. I have always been a fairly obsessive observer of people anyway, and during this wedding I became even more aware of body language. Where someone was looking. The change in a face just before laughter. Someone beginning to move towards another person. A hand reaching across the table. The few seconds before somebody hugged.
After a while, you start understanding the rhythm of a room without necessarily understanding the language being spoken inside it. For documentary wedding photography, those fractions of a second matter. Often the photograph I want exists just before everyone else in the room realises that something is happening. And slowly, Mathilde and Bendik seemed to forget that I was there as well. That was when the day really opened up.
Getting Ready Inside Villa Catignano
The morning gave me the chance to experience the villa in a completely different way. Mathilde got ready inside rooms filled with painted walls, old furniture, deep doorways and narrow passages of natural light. There was already so much visual information in the interiors that very little needed to be added or arranged. Her satin dress and lace veil felt almost contemporary against rooms that had been there for generations.
I never want a historic wedding venue to become nothing more than a decorative backdrop. I prefer photographing people as part of the space they are actually inhabiting. Some of my favourite photographs of Mathilde came from simply letting her move through those rooms rather than taking her away from them to manufacture a portrait.
Meanwhile, Bendik was getting ready with his friends in a completely different atmosphere. That contrast is something I always enjoy documenting: one side of the morning quiet and concentrated, the other already beginning to feel as though the celebration has started.
Why Villa Catignano Works So Well for a Wedding
There is an obvious reason historic villas are so popular for destination weddings in Tuscany, but Villa Catignano has something particularly useful from a photography point of view: the day can keep changing without everyone having to leave the property.
The estate has centuries of history behind it, with roots connected to the old settlement of Clatinianum and much of its present character shaped by the Sergardi family in the late seventeenth century. That history remains visible in the frescoed interiors, private chapel, courtyard, old Tinaia and formal Italian garden.
Set just outside Siena in the Sienese Chianti countryside, the property gives a wedding a natural rhythm. The morning can begin inside the villa, the ceremony can move into the garden, the afternoon can unfold outdoors under the Tuscan sun, and dinner can gradually take over the courtyard as the light disappears. As a Tuscany wedding photographer, I find that much more valuable than a venue offering twenty predetermined “photo spots.” What matters to me is whether people can move naturally through different spaces while the atmosphere and light change around them. Villa Catignano allows exactly that.
When They Forgot About the Camera
Beautifully planned by dear Chiara, the wedding planner behind the day, the wedding became easier and easier to photograph as the afternoon went on. Not because anything had changed technically, but because Mathilde and Bendik stopped thinking about being photographed. That is usually the point I am waiting for.
There were a few more composed portraits during the day, of course, but most of what interested me happened somewhere in between: Mathilde laughing with her friends, Bendik disappearing into groups of people, guests reacting to each other, people wandering away from the ceremony with glasses in their hands. At one point the men decided that throwing Bendik several metres into the air seemed like a reasonable idea. It produced one of my favourite photographs from the wedding.
Sometimes wedding photography really is just being in the correct place while adults make questionable decisions. Later, the same thing happened with Mathilde. She was moving through the gardens, laughing, lifting her dress, holding her bouquet above her head and becoming considerably less interested in maintaining the elegance of the first hour of the day. Which, photographically speaking, was excellent news.
Photographing the Wedding on Digital and 35mm Film
I photographed Mathilde and Bendik’s Villa Catignano wedding using both digital cameras and 35mm analogue film. I don’t use film because I want every photograph to imitate something from the past. I like it because it behaves differently.
Digital photography allows me to react continuously. I can follow subtle expressions, quick movement and complicated sequences without having to interrupt what is happening. Film asks something else from me. It slows the process down slightly. There are fewer frames, more commitment and less certainty. And as the day gets less formal, that unpredictability starts working particularly well.
By the time dinner and the party arrived, the 35mm photographs became looser. Flash, grain, people moving too close to the lens, half-finished glasses, faces appearing unexpectedly in the frame. They don’t necessarily describe the evening more accurately than the digital photographs. They remember it differently. That is why I like delivering both.
Dinner, Napkins and the Point Where Everything Changed
The dinner at Villa Catignano was one of those moments when the boundary between meal and party gradually disappeared. At some point, everyone was standing. Then everyone had napkins in their hands. And soon there was an entire table of people waving them above their heads under the lights.
This is the part of weddings I enjoy photographing most because there is very little left to control. The formal structure of the day has already happened. People have eaten, speeches have been made, jackets have started coming off and nobody particularly cares anymore about how they look in photographs. The photographer also becomes less visible.
I could move between tables, disappear into groups of people and photograph reactions from very close distances without disrupting anything. Then the saxophone appeared. From there, things became progressively less sophisticated. Which again was excellent news.
Somewhere in Between, We Started Talking About Bikes
One of the things I remember most clearly about Bendik has nothing to do with wedding photography. At some point I discovered that he was into road cycling. As someone who also spends an unreasonable amount of time thinking about bicycles, the conversation immediately moved away from weddings and towards roads. They still had time left in Tuscany and Italy after the wedding, so I ended up suggesting cycling routes and places he could ride. These small conversations are one of the reasons I like spending an entire wedding day with people rather than appearing only for a short portrait session.
By the end of ten or twelve hours together, you have usually talked about work, families, travelling, food, cities, bicycles and things that have absolutely nothing to do with photography. The photographs benefit from that as well. People behave differently around someone they have begun to know.
A Villa Catignano Wedding Without Too Much Interference
Looking back through Mathilde and Bendik’s photographs, what I like most is that the gallery doesn’t feel like one long photoshoot. There are portraits, but there is also confusion. There are elegant photographs of Matilde inside the villa and photographs where half the wedding party appears to have completely lost control. There are quiet black-and-white frames and direct-flash 35mm photographs from the party.
And somewhere between all of those images is the actual memory of the day. Villa Catignano gave us extraordinary rooms, gardens, changing light and the Tuscan landscape, but a beautiful venue alone doesn’t create an interesting wedding gallery. People do. Mathilde and Bendik gave me the freedom to observe rather than constantly direct them, and by the end of the wedding the cameras had become almost irrelevant. For me, that is usually when the best photographs begin.
If you are planning a wedding at Villa Catignano or elsewhere in Tuscany and are looking for a Tuscany wedding photographer working with a mixture of documentary digital photography and 35mm film, you can explore more of my wedding photography and get in touch through the website.
How Does It Work?
- Contact me and then let’s schedule a call so we get to know each other by talking about your needs and my services in detail.
- Once we agree on terms I send you a confirmation email and ask you to pay the first half of the total agreed amount so I fix the date.
- You have fun and I take care of the rest with my camera.
