Wedding Photography Melbourne

The people who have known me for a while know that I started out as a music photographer. The first wedding I ever shot was for the bassist in a band that I had photographed who just so happened to like my very primitive style at the time. Moving to Brisbane from Wollongong nearly 3 years ago was a huge step backwards professionally on this front, I was reasonably well known in Sydney circles but I didn’t have contacts up here and would have had to start all over again in Brisbane, which I never did due to a range of factors.

Brother and sister band bugGiRL are two people I’ve had a lot of history with; Clinton (perhaps the nicest man in the world) is the drummer and he was the drummer in my old band. The singer/guitarist Amber’s old band supported us at our EP launch and I’ve known them for ages. bugGiRL have been based out of the USA for a few years and have returned to Australia to record and release a number of EPs. Amber is currently playing with the all-girl Hell’s Belles, described by Angus Young as the world’s best AC/DC tribute band.

This shot is one I took for them about two years ago that has been sitting in my archives waiting to see the light of day. So here it is!

I still love doing this kind of work but I’m a bit fresh in Melbourne so if you can hook me up, go on ahead! There’s some interesting times ahead for me and doing some work like this every now and then would make sure that I won’t go to sleep dreaming of weddings.

I have a confession. I have no idea what the next stage of my life will be like and I’m a little scared. I was never really thoughtful enough about what kind of life I wanted, I just went with the flow and things often fell at my feet. Whether or not this is a good thing in life is debatable, and perhaps I lived up to my nickname of Lucky, but I definitely didn’t learn any lessons about planning.

I never settled into Brisbane properly, I didn’t make many friends and it was missing something, a certain je ne sais quoi… It just never felt like home as much as I tried to make it over the 3 years I’ve been here. Meeting Kristen however was the shining beacon of my time in Brisbane and it was only pure chance that put us in the same place at the same time, so far from home and from our ideal environment.

I love cold weather. I love music and bands. I love markets and vibrant culture. I love being able to be impulsive and go to do something without planning. Brisbane has some of these things, but not enough for what I wanted. There was only one place where I felt I could get all of this (and what else we needed) and that place is Melbourne.

Kristen works in a sector that has most of its work based out of Melbourne so it made sense that we would be favourable to it and having visited there over the weekend to help her settle into our new apartment, it already feels like home. We’ll be living in the inner city suburb of Brunswick which is home to coffee shops, restaurants, cafes, pubs and live music venues, something we missed so much living where we did in Brisbane. I’m so excited about being there and I’ve never felt this way.

But the fear still sits there. This is the first time in my life I will be somewhere with no idea of where I’m headed and I hope that Melbourne accepts me with its warm arms and gives me happiness. It’ll be an interesting ride so I guess I have no choice but to dive on in and give it a go. Come mid-March, I’ll riding off into the sunset to become Lakshal Perera, Melbourne Wedding Photographer, the newest, hippest and most awesome dude to come to your southern shores.

See you there, we’ll sip some lattes on Lygon St.

In the 2 days since we returned from our trip to Sri Lanka and Malaysia, my brain has been running at a million kilometres per hour. We’ve got less than 6 weeks before we move to Melbourne (more on that soon), and I’ve still got so much stuff to get finalised in Brisbane. I wanted to post these images earlier than this but it seemed that time was my enemy as the organisation of a wedding overseas was much more difficult and complicated than we ever could have imagined. But here they finally are, a wonderful pair of humans, the beautifully elegant Maddy and the dashing Aaron. The words I want to use just won’t come out of my head very clearly right now but I hope these images will speak louder than I ever could.