The Midland Hotel ~ A Manchester Elopement Editorial
An urban elopement editorial with eugene & ant at
the midland hotel, manchester
This modern, Manchester editorial elopement story was a bit of a passion project of ours. Eugene (right) is an old friend and we first started talking about the idea of a collaborating on a shoot with him and his partner, Ant, back in 2023. With all of us having busy diaries it took a while to make things happen, but we are so glad we managed to pin down a date in April to bring our concept to life.
We wanted to lean into a simple elopement vibe for this editorial, keeping the focus largely on the couple and letting their love take centre stage. We also wanted to challenge ourselves by shooting entirely with direct flash - we love the look of 90s flash photography and have been developing our skills to weave this style seamlessly into our wedding galleries.
After toying with a few ideas for a location, we eventually decided a low key, elegant theme would be really interesting mixed in with some more urban shots around Manchester City Centre.
The iconic Midland Hotel in Manchester was the perfect location for the main part of the shoot, with its timeless elegance and signature charm.
We booked a lavish suite fit for the theme and involved a small, but hugely talented team of suppliers. We wanted to showcase that you can absolutely break tradition when it comes to your wedding day - and that smaller doesn’t mean lesser.
The vintage style, monochrome cake was provided by the hugely talented Leanne, from The Sweetest Thing Cakery, and let us tell you it tasted just as good as it looked! We also had some gorgeous monogrammed ribbons and coasters made by Amy of From Afar Embroidery. Amy is one of our brides from 2021 and she is the sweetest person ever! She even made us some of our own ‘The Twigs’ napkins too, which we absolutely adore.
We knew we wanted to have some confetti fun with this editorial and our friends at Your Confetti provided us with a HUGE bagful of their paper disc, biodegradable confetti, designed to flutter around in the air longer for those dramatic photos. And yes… we did pick up EVERY. SINGLE. PIECE afterwards! The YC team have even been kind enough to give us an exclusive discount code for our couples - just enter YCTWIGSBRANCH at the checkout at your confetti.com for 15% off your purchase.
We had three different scenes in mind for this editorial, we think about our photography very much like a film and are always thinking about how we can best tell a story. We broke it down to; pre-wedding/getting ready, followed by a post wedding celebration with room service, champagne & cake, before hitting the town to party the night away.
After utilising every bit of the stunning suite at The Midland Hotel, we made our way to the champagne bar in the lounge of the hotel for a few shots (of the photo variety), before our cinematic story continued to the urban streets of the city centre.
We had some fun bar hopping, before heading back to the hotel where we closed our story with the couple heading back to their suite and… well you know the rest!
This editorial was so much fun, it was so freeing to create beautiful imagery that shows a wedding can be anything you want it to be.
Incidentally, this is also the only editorial you will currently find on our website or socials. That’s because although these types of shoots are great for development and creativity, in our case using only flash and pushing ourselves to focus on emotion and storytelling, they are also not representative of a real wedding day. A wedding comes with all sorts of time and other pressures that influence the outcome of a final gallery, and with this in mind we gave ourselves a strict time limit on this shoot, as well as using a real life couple instead of professional models. This meant we were able to keep this shoot as authentic and true to a real wedding day as possible.
Supplier team:
Photographer, Concept & Planning: Twigs Branch Photography
Venue: The Midland Hotel
Cake: The Sweetest Thing Cakery
Embroidered Items: From Afar Embroidery
Confetti: Your Confetti
Flowers: Hidden Botanics
Champagne glasses: Habitat
Couple: Eugene Jones & Anthony Andrews