A Decade In: Planning a Ten Year Anniversary Photo Shoot

A decade of marriage is a genuinely significant thing to mark, and yet it is a milestone that so many couples let pass with nothing more than a card and a nice dinner. I understand why — by year ten, life is usually full. There may be children, mortgages, ageing parents, careers that have taken over more space than anyone planned. The idea of booking a photographer to mark an anniversary can feel indulgent, even a little strange, when you did not think twice about it on your wedding day. But I have photographed enough ten-year anniversary sessions now to say with real confidence that they are some of the most quietly moving sessions I do all year. The couples who come to me for this are not chasing a fantasy or trying to recreate their wedding day. They are asking for something more interesting: a true, current portrait of who they have actually become together.

Why Ten Years Is a Different Kind of Milestone

Wedding photography captures a single, extraordinary, once-only day — the nerves, the dress, the speeches, the sheer newness of it all. A ten-year anniversary session captures something else entirely: ease. By this point, most couples have stopped performing for a camera. They know each other's habits, jokes, and irritations. They have navigated at least one genuinely hard year together, probably more than one. What comes through in these sessions is not the polished excitement of a wedding day but a settled, lived-in warmth that is very difficult to fake and very beautiful to photograph.

I always ask couples booking this kind of session what has changed since their wedding, and the answers are rarely trivial. Children who did not exist on the wedding day are now old enough to be part of the shoot, or old enough to have opinions about being left out of it. Careers have shifted. Some couples have moved house two or three times. A few have been through serious illness, bereavement, or periods of real strain, and have come out the other side still choosing each other. None of that history needs to be spelled out in the photographs, but it is part of why the images end up feeling so different from wedding portraits — there is a groundedness to a ten-year couple that a newly married couple, however happy, simply has not had time to develop yet.

Choosing a Location That Means Something

For a wedding, the venue is usually chosen months in advance around logistics: guest numbers, catering, accessibility, budget. For an anniversary session, none of those constraints apply, and it opens up a much more personal question: where does this stage of your life actually happen? I encourage couples to think less about "photogenic" and more about "true." Some couples want to return to the church, register office, or hotel where they married, which can be genuinely moving, especially if the venue has stayed largely unchanged. Others actively do not want to revisit the wedding venue at all — they would rather mark ten years somewhere that reflects their life now rather than the day itself.

In and around Cambridge, I find couples gravitate towards a handful of settings depending on what they want the photographs to say. Riverside spots along the Cam suit couples who want something classic and a little romantic, particularly with the light in late afternoon. Open countryside and farmland on the edges of the city suit couples with children and dogs who want space to move and play rather than a formal backdrop. Some couples choose their own garden or the street where they live, which sounds unglamorous on paper but often produces the most honest images of all — this is genuinely where their life is lived, and photographs taken there tend to feel less like a shoot and more like a document.

Weather and season matter too, of course. A ten-year anniversary is not tied to a fixed date the way a wedding booking often is, so there is real freedom to choose a month with kind light and a reasonable chance of good weather. Late spring and early autumn tend to be the sweet spot in this part of the country — soft, warm light without the harsh overhead sun of high summer, and usually still mild enough that nobody is shivering through the session.

Involving Children Without Losing the Couple

A large proportion of the ten-year anniversary sessions I photograph involve children, and this is where planning matters most. The instinct many parents have is to make it a full family session throughout, which is understandable but tends to dilute the actual purpose of the shoot. My usual approach is to split the session into two distinct halves. We begin with the whole family together — genuinely playful, unposed time with the children included, capturing the family as it exists today. Then, partway through, a grandparent, friend, or babysitter takes the children off for twenty minutes or so, and the second half of the session belongs entirely to the couple.

That second half is where the anniversary photographs really live. Away from the demands of managing small children, couples visibly relax. Conversations happen that would not happen with a toddler tugging at a sleeve. I ask couples to walk together, talk about something specific — often I will ask them to recall a detail from their wedding day, or discuss where they think they will be in another ten years — and the resulting expressions are unforced in a way that direct posing rarely achieves. If arranging childcare for even part of the session is not possible, that is genuinely fine too; some of the loveliest images I have taken involve a ten-year-old couple with their children fully present throughout, laughing at the chaos rather than trying to eliminate it.

What to Wear for an Anniversary Session

Unlike a wedding, there is no single correct outfit for an anniversary shoot, and that freedom trips a surprising number of couples up. My general guidance is to dress as a slightly elevated version of yourselves rather than as different people entirely. If you are a jeans-and-jumper couple day to day, a smart pair of dark jeans with a well-fitted jumper or shirt will photograph beautifully and still look like you. If you lean more formal in daily life, lean into that rather than forcing yourselves into deliberately casual clothing that will feel unnatural on camera.

Coordinating rather than matching is the aim. I usually suggest picking two or three complementary tones — perhaps a warm neutral palette of cream, camel, and deep green, or a cooler palette of navy, grey, and dusty blue — and building each person's outfit within that range rather than putting everyone in identical shirts. Some couples like to bring a second outfit for variety partway through the session, which works well if there is time and if changing does not eat too heavily into the light. A small number of couples ask to wear something connected to the wedding day itself — a piece of jewellery, a tie, a particular colour from the original bridal party — and those small details, while subtle in the final images, tend to mean a great deal to the couple looking back at them later.

One thing I always mention: bring the original wedding rings, obviously, but also consider bringing anything tangible from the day itself if you still have it — an order of service, a piece of the cake topper, a pressed flower from the bouquet. These objects rarely become the whole photograph, but a few detail shots incorporating them alongside a decade-old ring and a hand that has changed in small ways since then can be some of the most affecting images from the whole session.

How the Session Actually Runs

A typical ten-year anniversary session runs for around an hour to ninety minutes, depending on how many parts are involved — family time, couple time, and any detail or location changes. I generally recommend starting a couple of hours before sunset, which gives us time to work through any group elements first while the light is still relatively even, before moving into the warmer, more flattering light of early evening for the couple-only portion. Unlike a wedding day, there is no rigid timeline to hit and no other events pressing in afterwards, which makes for a far more relaxed pace than almost any wedding photography I do.

I spend the first ten minutes or so simply talking with the couple before a single frame is taken — partly to settle any nerves, most couples have not been properly photographed since their wedding day and feel a little self-conscious about it, and partly because that conversation genuinely informs how I photograph them. A couple who mention they still make each other laugh constantly get photographed differently from a couple who describe their relationship as quiet and steady. Neither is better; the photographs should simply reflect what is actually true of the two of you rather than a generic template of "anniversary couple."

Throughout the session I deliberately alternate between directed moments — walking towards camera, a specific embrace, looking at each other rather than the lens — and genuinely candid stretches where I ask the couple to simply talk to each other and largely ignore me. Those candid stretches consistently produce the images couples respond to most strongly afterwards, because they show an authentic exchange rather than a performed one. My job in those moments is mostly about positioning myself well and staying quiet, not about directing.

What You End Up With

The final gallery from an anniversary session is delivered as a curated set of fully edited digital images, generally within a couple of weeks, through an online gallery with a full-resolution download link and options to order prints or wall art directly. Many couples choose to have a handful of the images printed for the home — a decade in, the walls have often not been refreshed with a proper portrait since the wedding, and it is genuinely striking to hang a current image of yourselves as a couple next to, or instead of, one from ten years earlier.

A number of couples also use these sessions as the foundation for a small album, particularly if they never quite got around to finishing a wedding album, or if that album now feels dated compared to how the relationship actually looks and feels today. I have had more than one couple tell me, half-joking, that the anniversary photographs are the ones they actually recognise themselves in, more than the wedding pictures, precisely because a decade of change is visible and honest in them rather than airbrushed away.

Ten years is worth marking properly, and a photograph is one of the few things that genuinely holds up over the following decade — long after the card has been recycled and the anniversary dinner is a vague memory, the images remain, and tend to matter more with each year that passes rather than less. If you are approaching a significant anniversary and would like to talk through what a session might involve for you, whether that means a quiet couple-only shoot, a full family portrait, or something in between, get in touch and we can find a date, a location, and an approach that actually fits the two of you.