The Wedding Photographer Got It In Frame And Deleted It

I was the best man, so I spent the evening carrying things and apologising, which is the job.

Behind the marquee, about eleven, I found the photographer sitting on a beer crate having what I would call a professional crisis.

She showed me the back of the camera. It was a shot of the couple, taken maybe an hour earlier, first dance, lovely, exactly the sort of thing people pay for. And in the top-left of the frame, through the open flap of the marquee, out over the fields, there were three lights in a line, and they were reflected in the plastic window of the marquee wall, which is the detail that killed me, because a reflection means they were real light, hitting a surface, at that moment.

I said something helpful like "what is that", and she said, "I don't know, and it's in nine shots."

Then she deleted them.

All nine. Right there, in front of me, thumb on the button, while I said her name in an increasingly stupid voice.

She said — and I have thought about this for four years — "If that ends up on the internet, that's what I am now. I'm the UFO wedding girl. I've got a mortgage."

She kept the rest of the album. It is a beautiful album. The couple love it. They know nothing about any of this, and I have never told them, because what would that even be — a gift?

Here is my honest doubt, offered up front: it was a wedding, I had been drinking since two in the afternoon, and I saw an image on a three-inch screen for about eight seconds.

But I was not drunk enough to invent the reflection. The reflection is what I dream about. The reflection means the field was lit.

She is still working. She is very good. If you have been married in that county in the last few years, she may well have taken your photographs.

She has never answered a single one of my emails.