I’ve shot a good number of Indian weddings at The Ritz over the years. Strong colour, gold, live music and a few hundred guests set inside one of the most classically English buildings in London — it’s a striking combination, and it usually gives me one of the fuller wedding galleries I put together in a year.
The rooms
The Ritz has enough separate spaces to hold the different parts of an Indian wedding without repeating the same backdrop all day — the Palm Court for something smaller and daylit, one of the larger suites for the ceremony itself, a private room upstairs for bridal prep. That variety matters more here than at most venues, because an Indian wedding usually has more distinct parts to it than a single ceremony and reception: a sangeet, sometimes a mehendi, the wedding itself, a reception, occasionally spread across more than one day.
The Palm Court’s tall windows along Piccadilly give some of the best daylight I get to work with in London, and the gilding throughout the hotel does something useful with strong colour — reds, gold thread, emerald green all read well against it rather than fighting it. Not something the hotel built with this in mind, but it suits the day.
The ceremony
My job during the ceremony is to stay close enough for the details — hands during the henna, jewellery catching the light, parents watching — without getting in the way of the ritual itself. I don’t direct any of it. A shehnai or a tabla carries well through the Ritz’s rooms, and you can generally see on people’s faces the moment the music and the ceremony line up. That’s what I’m watching for.
The Ritz’s events team has done enough Indian weddings to understand muhurat timings and know when not to interrupt, which makes the day considerably easier to photograph than a venue coming to it cold.
The technical bit
Indian ceremonies mix low light, candles or a havan, and very saturated fabric, sometimes in the same frame. Getting that right consistently — skin tones exposed properly across a range of complexions, gold looking like gold rather than a blown-out white patch, colour held onto rather than crushed — is less about the venue and more about having shot enough of them to know what to expect. It only really comes from doing it repeatedly.
Multi-day and destination weddings
A lot of the Indian weddings I shoot at The Ritz have family flying in from India, the Gulf, the US or Singapore for a single London weekend. Alongside the couple and the ceremony itself, I make a point of properly photographing the venue — the Palm Court dressed for the day, the dining room set for the reception, the building lit up on Piccadilly at night. Those wider shots matter more than usual here, because for a lot of the guests they’re the only record of where the wedding actually happened.
What you get back
Indian weddings produce some of the largest galleries I deliver — more functions, more outfit changes, more relatives, more to record. Expect full coverage of the day: venue and styling shots, the ceremony, family portraits, the reception and dancing, and a proper set of portraits of the two of you, all fully edited.
Getting married at The Ritz?
I’ve written a full guide to the venue — the rooms, what to expect from the day, and my pricing. There’s a live date checker on the page.
The Ritz London wedding photography — prices and availability
