Joshua Anstey Photography

25/12/2025

Happy Christmas, ya filthy animals. 🎄🥳
May it be joyful and glorious.

23/12/2025

That’s a wrap from me for 2025. 🥳 I’m out of the office until the 6th when I may or may not use the quieter season to post at least some of the 35 weddings I shot this year. 😂🤦🏼‍♂️
So far I’ve only managed 10 of them because I find it so hard to settle on which ones to post. Sometimes I think the best option is to just not think about it, but then those posts don’t tend to do as well and I do have a mortgage to pay.
I digress…
Anyway, I’m deleting the instagram app from my phone over Christmas so that I can concentrate on my kids and I won’t be checking my emails, so if you need me, it very likely won’t be until the 6th that I get back to you. In the meantime, here’s a couple of photos from my last wedding of the year. They’re not even my favourites from that wedding. I’ll try and share those in a few weeks. I took some absolute belters this year if I do say so, you just wouldn’t know it from my IG feed.

Proper crimbo everyone. x

26/06/2025

Garden games done properly. 🙌🏻
Tug of war pops up at weddings maybe once a year and the sight of people in expensive suits and dresses dragging each other to the ground is an absolute winner in my books.

Bonus points if as in this case the ground’s wet. Extra chaos. 😂

Venue:

06/06/2025

The This Is Reportage awards just dropped and seemingly every photographer I follow is posting their wins. I didn’t win one, so here’s a non-award winning image which I’m deeply fond of despite the lack of a logo in the bottom corner.

There’s a wedding photographer who I really admire and is widely considered to be one of the best in the world, who actually has in his IG bio “winner of 0 awards”. I also know of incredible professionals who have entered images into awards numerous times before they finally won. Meanwhile, there are others out there who are multi-award winning despite not being (and I’m trying not to be snooty here) quite at a ‘professional’ standard. It very much depends on which awards you enter or are nominated for.

The moral here - and no, this isn’t me being bitter that I didn’t win - is that awards are wonderful things. We should absolutely be celebrating excellence, and the winners should absolutely be super proud of what they’ve achieved. But we should also remember that the number of awards (or lack thereof) doesn’t directly correlate to someone’s professionalism, success, skill or calibre. And to my fellow photographers out there who don’t have anything impressive to announce today - what really matters is whether your clients love what you do, not what the industry says they should love.

Anstey out. x

24/05/2025

I present to you: “Lunchtime” - a photographic side-story of deliciousness from a wedding last month.

Nice food by
Nice house by

23/05/2025

I did stick this one of a wedding party marching into a skip on my stories a while back but I feel it deserves a permanent spot on the wall.

I’ve actually been thinking for a while how despite couple’s portraits only making up about 15 minutes of a wedding day (and a decent number of my couples not even wanting to do them) my feed is mostly made up of portraits and stuff that looks posed. I’ve said before I don’t pose couples and I honestly feel that the best photos I make aren’t actually these portraits which make up a tiny proportion of a wedding. Honestly it’s just hard when you’re a business owner not to be led by what you think will perform well on IG rather than posting the stuff that you want to.

Thought I might try just throwing stuff up on here with very little thought over how it’ll perform and see what happens. Hopefully at the very least my feed will be a better reflection of the kind of photos that’ll make up the majority of your gallery, not just the 15 minutes you went for a wander in a field. (Although I do love a good sunset portrait and I won’t apologise for that.

Can’t believe you’re still reading. Haven’t you got something better to do?

05/05/2025

Back at yesterday… again. Here’s a bunch of my favourites minus the goodness knows how many that I couldn’t fit in the stupid Instagram carousel. 🙄

Big shout to one of the most relatable couples I’ve had in years and a special mention to the chap from who hosted one of the warmest civil ceremonies I’ve seen, and was generally an incredible sport.

Other cool people:
Venue:
Prep venue:
Ceremony:
Hair:
Makeup:
Dress:
Flowers:
Food:
Drink: &
DJ:
Design:

02/04/2025

A few faves from the first wedding of the 2025, back in February. Had a few since, but things are gonna start to get pretty wild next month when wedding season properly kicks off. I am ABSOLUTELY desperate for summer to start. I hate being cold.

I can’t wait to photograph all of your lovely weddings, winter has been SO dull. I can’t tell you how much I love being paid to go to a wedding every week. 🥳

People who did stuff…👇🏻
Ceremony venue:
Ceremony:
Hair:
Makeup:
Dope-ass shoes:
Flowers: DIY
Cake:
Reception & catering:

30/03/2025

Hope your mum looks at you like this, even when you’re not looking at her.

25/03/2025

Finally starting to get round to posting a few weddings from last season, just in time for it to start getting busy again. 😂🤦🏼‍♂️

Have a little nose through some nice photos from the really nice wedding of two really nice people. We kick things off with this champion shot from me hiding in an apple tree. 👌🏻

Get stuck in here. 👇🏻

We started the day upstairs in one of the rooms at Otley Hall, where Amy was getting ready with her best friends and her mum. It’s a gorgeous, creaky old building and I go a bit weak at the knees any time I’m allowed to snoop around historic places like this. Otley Hall is particularly delicious...

30/01/2025

So your gran tells you she wants a nice photo for her mantlepiece, and you know what she means, and you want to make her happy, but you'd also rather chew your own fingers off than stand around posing on your wedding day. What do you do? Here's a bunch of waffle to help you decide. 👇🏻

Formal group photos: a time-honoured tradition, or an unnecessary hassle? It’s a question more and more couples are asking themselves, and with good reason. While classic group formals have their place, they’re not the must-have they once were, and if you’re drawn to documentary-style wedding ...

15/01/2025

One of the loveliest wedding favour ideas I’ve ever seen; Alex & Hannah spent hours upon hours creating name cards for every guest with a personalised fictional dictionary entry. The dedication was seriously impressive and some of the definitions were beautifully heartfelt which resulted in sheer delight from their guests.