"Do you prefer couples who are comfortable with a camera?"
By the time they asked, they were already in front of it — laughing, soft, themselves.
Two countries, one promise broken on purpose
Valen is from Argentina. Amanda is from Brazil. They met in Ireland — and then life did what life does. Different cities. Long train journeys. The kind of distance that becomes a Sunday-night ache.
Both of them had promised themselves, separately, that they'd never do long distance. Two countries, two different lives, two private promises — and then they fell in love, and the promises had to negotiate with the love.
So they did the journeys. They missed each other. They figured it out — slowly, in the way that long love asks you to figure things out — and eventually they did what people do when they finally choose each other for real: they pulled their lives into the same flat, into the same city, into the same future.
Shy with the camera — then not
They warned us early they were shy. They didn't know their angles. They weren't models. There was the small nervousness people have when they're about to be looked at all day for the first time. It's one of my favourite kinds of couples to work with — because that nervousness, once it loosens, becomes something only they can give you.
By the middle of the morning they had already let go. By the afternoon they were laughing into each other's faces, forgetting the lens was there. And it was then — relaxed, soft, completely themselves — that one of them turned to me between takes and asked, almost casually: do you prefer working with couples who are used to being photographed? People who know the angles?
I told them the truth: the couples I love working with the most are the ones who are in love. The camera figures itself out. They told me afterwards that Elisha and I had made the whole thing far easier than they'd expected — that they'd braced for hours of pretending, and instead got hours of just being together.
Film by Anna Mello · Photography by Elisha Clarke
On this wedding I was on film only. The stills were photographed by the brilliant Elisha Clarke — who I'd happily work alongside again any day. We split the day in the way two people do when neither needs to be loud: she watched what I couldn't, I caught what she couldn't, and somehow the day got covered without either of us crowding it.
Valen and Amanda have watched the film, by their own count, "seventy million times." That, in itself, is the result I work for.
This one's for everyone who once promised themselves they'd never. Sometimes the difficulty is the love. Sometimes it's just the proof of it.
Coverage · Civil wedding film (video only), Dublin · 29 May ’26
Ceremony · Civil ceremony, Dublin registry
Photographer · Elisha Clarke Photography
Couple · Valen (AR) & Amanda (BR), met in Ireland, did the long distance, made it home
Result · The film they've watched, in their words, seventy million times
