After all those heterosexual pairings, here’s a homosexual one. I live in the gay capital of the UK and photograph weddings, yet I had to drive to Stratford-upon-Avon to shoot my first civil partnership. Ivan used to design clothes, some of which my sister used to model, and now he is Costume Co-ordinator at the RSC, which conjures up images of him telling Patrick Stewart that his doublet doesn’t go with his hose.

Ivan got hitched to Fraser in August and I’ve only recently posted online my attempts to record the event because I took advantage of there already being an official photographer present to experiment with everything from a new flash diffuser to a different mix of film. The end result was that I had to send the results to two labs and adjust half of the images digitally to fix the contrast. It’s not my best work, but you can check out the gallery here. Despite my less than perfect photography, you can see from the pics that the gathering was the sort of rainbow of humanity that chartered diversity facilitators can only dream about.

But everything went as well as possible with the do itself, though Ivan’s mum had to deal with the trauma of Ivan somewhat insensitively using the occasion to come out as Scottish.

On the plus side, given that Ivan’s surname is “Douglas”, this at least provided further evidence for the hypothesis there is a strong genetic element in Scottishness; on the minus side it was a disappointment for me, as neither he nor Fraser wore trousers.