Jenny McCarthy's favourite moments from 20 years of wedding photography

Despite 20 years working as a wedding photographer, Jenny McCarthy still feels really lucky to be part of the love and romance of so many families’ happiest day

Natasha Ray and Stephen Dunleavy, pictured by Jenny McCarthy

The man who owned the farm next door arrived on a tractor on the morning of the wedding. He'd been “almost a second daddy” to her — and she wanted to see him on this special morning.

For Jenny McCarthy, it is a stand-out memory from her two decades as a wedding photographer: “The bride wanted to see him, but he said a wedding wasn’t the place for him — he thought it was too fancy. He arrived at the door of her house on the tractor, an old man, dressed in an overcoat with a belt like a rope."

“He caught sight of her in her wedding dress and he started to cry. I’ll never forget the feeling I got. I can’t imagine what she must have felt. It was so real and so raw. I put the photo in black and white for her. It was one of the most beautiful moments I ever captured.”

The bride's neighbour arrived on his tractor on the morning of her wedding to see her. Pic: Jenny McCarthy

In the years since, Jenny has met the bride’s mum and heard that the old man has now passed away. “When you capture a story in the blink of an eye, you capture it forever,” she muses.

Looking through a lens and catching a story unfolding is what Jenny feels “so lucky” to spend her working day doing.

“So many stories happen around a wedding — in the church, at the drinks reception, in the bride’s home on the morning of the wedding. I love weddings because of the amount of love in them.”

Often that love is palpable even when a loved one isn’t physically at the wedding. Jenny recalls discussing the logistics of a wedding with a couple in her studio: “The bride said she’d lost her mum to breast cancer, just a year or two before. The mum had been quite young and before she died, the bride said, ‘she did a few things for me’. She wanted these photographed,” says Jenny, explaining how the mum had bought her daughter a garter and a headpiece and put with each a little note saying ‘to be worn on your wedding day and then passed on to [her sisters] for their wedding day’.

For Jenny, that moment when a father sees his daughter for the first time in her wedding dress is a priceless moment: “The dad walks into a room. He sees her for the first time. In the photo I capture Dad and daughter facing each other. She’s slightly out of focus because it is all about him. It is a very emotional moment. Even if we’re running over time, I won’t go anywhere until that moment is captured because it is just essential.”

"The dad walks into a room. He sees her for the first time. In the photo I capture Dad and daughter facing each other. She’s slightly out of focus because it is all about him. It is a very emotional moment."

She recalls this moment for the dad of the bride whose mum had passed away. “We were down in the kitchen. When he saw her, he just fell apart. I have that photograph in my wedding book.”

The dad-seeing-daughter moment holds an extra poignancy for Jenny because her own dad died when his family was quite young: “So he never got to see us on our wedding day.”

Her favourite photo from her own 2011 wedding to Virgin Media star Martin King features the Sam Maguire. “Martin’s a massive Dublin GAA fan and Dublin had just won the all-Ireland,” she says, recalling how, with the help of “somebody I knew in TV3, as it was then”, she organised for Sam to come to the wedding.

“I didn’t tell Martin. He’d never held Sam Maguire before. So everybody was standing in a big group at the end of the stairs in Killashee House Hotel, and the five children walked down with the Sam Maguire. And the band played ‘When the Dubs go up to lift the Sam Maguire’. So my favourite shot is of Martin seeing Sam Maguire in the kids’ hands and his hands are up to his face and he’s just blown away.”

Jenny has photographed some of Ireland’s biggest celebrities on their wedding day — Suzanne Jackson, Pippa O’Connor, Terrie McEvoy, Rosie Connolly, Brian Dowling, Glenda Gilson, and footballers Stephanie Roche, James McCarthy, and Seamus Coleman.

Dublin footballer James McCarthy and Clodagh O'Mahony - snapped by Jenny McCarthy

And yet, no matter how high-profile or ‘down home’ a wedding is, there’s always some little hiccup. “There’s always a dilemma of some sort,” says Jenny, recalling one near-dilemma which happened at Suzanne Jackson’s wedding to Dylan O’Connor.

“Dylan had organised a helicopter as a surprise for her, so after the church we drove to the aerodrome. Suzanne had her little bag of lipstick and powder with her, which she put under the seat in the helicopter. Afterwards, the helicopter landed in Powerscourt and we got out and into the waiting cars. And we got that lovely photo in the avenue with the Sugarloaf in the background.

“And then Suzanne said ‘where’s my handbag?!’ And we all looked up into the sky and the helicopter was going off.” Thankfully, the party quickly discovered the pilot had handed the bag to the car driver, and all was well. “But just for that moment… the fact that Suzanne didn’t have her make-up and lipstick, which is so important for her because that’s her look.”

And there was the bride who had the near-dress-disaster. “Her train was almost like a skirt. It went around her waist, was fastened with a hook and made the train.” Jenny helped the bride put it on that morning (“when it comes to the wedding morning, Mum and bridesmaids are nervous, they’ve got fake tan on, so I help out”). She noticed the little hook on the dress was very loose.

“I said I wouldn’t be happy with that, would she like me to put a stitch in it? She said no, it’d be fine. The hook snapped as she was getting out of the car outside the church. She went into complete meltdown. I carry a bum bag, my ‘bag of tricks’, it has essential items — white thread, scissors, deodorant.

“So I said ‘do you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to stop panicking, and I’m going to sew this on’. I pulled her around the side of the church and I sewed her into the dress,” says Jenny, who also keeps a suitcase in her car boot. In that — “everything from a white towel to put under the dress, a can of hair spray, curling tongs, every colour thread you could possibly need, a lint brush, anti-histamines, and a damp facecloth to get make-up off the groom’s suit after people have hugged him”.

Brian Dowling with husband Arthur at their wedding

But if something small does go wrong on your wedding day, Jenny’s advice is to tell no one, let it go.

And on the matter of booking your wedding photographer, she recommends never making your decision solely on what you see on Instagram. “You’ll see their best work on Instagram, but you need to ask all your questions and make sure they’re all answered: will they turn up on time, will they capture that all-important family photo?"

“I met a girl who has beautiful photos of her with her husband — but none of her with her mother. That’s not on.”

• Jenny McCarthy’s book, The Wedding, €60, with all the tips, tricks and hacks she has learned over 20 years, is out this month.