Indian Wedding Photography

As most of you know, Indian Wedding Photography is very festive and colourful, and is made up of a few events that are usually celebrated over a couple of days. The wedding of Himarsha and Vijesh took us all the way to South Africa’s beautiful East Coast, one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world. Their celebrations on the first day kicked off with a religious ceremony for both bride and groom in the morning, followed by Himarsha’s mehndi event in the afternoon.

Among the many traditions that are infused into Indian weddings, one of the most prominent is the mehndi ceremony, and for Meyer and I, also one of our favourite pre-wedding ceremonies of the wedding to photograph. Mehndi or Henna is a paste that is created from the powdered leaf of the henna plant and is made into designs for men and women. In the modern age and even due to limited supply of Indian Traditional Mehndi artists, people usually buy ready-made Henna cones, which are ready to use and make painting easy. It is typically applied during weddings, for brides, and according to tradition, the ceremony is mainly held at the bride’s house a day or two before the marriage ceremony.

Generally the bride and groom attend the event together and a professional mehndi artist or a relative applies mehndi to the bride’s hands and feet. The designs are very intricate and I absolutely love to watch the process of how this is applied.

Now here is a fact I never knew about Mehndi: Besides lending colour to the hands, mehndi is a very powerful medicinal herb. Weddings are stressful, and often, the stress causes headaches and fevers. Application of mehndi can prevent too much stress because it cools the body and keeps the nerves from becoming tense. This is the reason why mehndi is applied on the hands and feet, which house nerve endings in the body.

And can we all, just for a second, admire Himarsha’s amazing mehndi outfit…

We’ve been looking forward to sharing some of the highlights of their pre-events for a while now, and what made this wedding even more special (and personal) for us, is the fact that we’ve done a few family weddings for the groom’s side over the last few years back in the UK, so it was great to see so many familiar faces from the UK join in the celebrations with Vijesh and Himarsha here on home soil.

The evening pre-wedding party was held at the KwaZulu-Natal Sharks Board with an enchanted forest theme and the main idea was for both families to get to know each other a little better. We could say with great confidence that this was achieved, as one thing was certain, everyone had a great time and this was just the warm up for what was to come on the big day! Keep an eye out for our documentation of their wedding day – this will be on our blog soon.

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