Four entries went in. Two came out on the shortlist, in a category the awards themselves describe as one of their most competitive.
I'm Josh Dale-Barton. I run 21 Photography from Chesterfield, Derbyshire, and I've been photographing weddings for eleven years. I work solo, documentary-led, mostly across Derbyshire, South Yorkshire and the Peak District. My fiancée Sophie runs the social side of the business. That's the whole operation.
Here's what made it through, and why I think it did.
Daisy, at Tideswell
A few weeks before their wedding, Gemma emailed to tell me her elderly beagle Daisy had just been diagnosed with cancer and wasn't expected to be with the family much longer. Gemma and Chris had travelled from Wales to marry at St John the Baptist in Tideswell, the church known round here as the Cathedral of the Peak.
That email changed how I approached the whole day. There are frames you'd like to get and frames you have to get, and this became one of the latter before I'd even arrived.
After the ceremony, Daisy settled onto a bench outside the church and Gemma lifted her veil over the two of them.
What I decided was to step back rather than move in, and to shoot through the veil rather than lifting it out of the way. The mesh sits between the viewer and the moment, which is the point. Daisy reads as the brightest shape inside the frame. I converted it to black and white so nothing competed with the two faces, and I didn't direct any of it.
Daisy has since outlived her prognosis and is still with the family, which is a much better ending than the one everyone was braced for.
Mother of the Bride, at Dunston Hall
The bride was never the subject in this one. Her mum was.
She'd been in tears at the first look earlier in the morning and was still barely holding it together coming down the stairs. That was the frame I was waiting on. I'd been watching the big landing windows all morning and I know how my 23mm handles flare, so I put myself where the light would come through and exposed for their two faces rather than protecting the window.
The staircase does the rest. Bridesmaids stacking back up behind them, the whole procession in one frame, nobody posed into position.
Why I think these two landed
Looking at the full shortlist, most of the work on it is built around a device: hard light, an unusual vantage point, a landscape doing the heavy lifting, or a genuinely funny moment caught in passing. All of it good, some of it better than mine.
Both of my shortlisted frames are built around a relationship instead. A woman and her dying dog. A mother and her daughter. That's what I've always shot for, and it's reassuring to find it holds up against work with more spectacle in it.
The other thing I'd say is that the captions mattered. The awards ask you to explain why an image is special, and both of mine needed context a judge couldn't see in the frame. Neither photograph is technically showy. Without the story attached, I doubt either one gets a second look.
What this doesn't change
I still shoot two Fujifilm X-T3 bodies. I still turn up on my own. I still spend most of a wedding day at the edges of the room rather than in the middle of it, which is the only way I know to get the frames I actually want.
A shortlist is a nice thing to have and I'm chuffed with it. But the reason the Daisy photograph exists isn't the awards. It exists because Gemma asked for a picture with her dog while she still could, and I was the one holding the camera.
That's the job.