2024 Review – Another adventure completed 🎉

Wow. This year’s gone by in a flash (pun intended). It seems like two minutes ago that we welcomed in 2024 and now it’s 2025. Jeez. Where has the time gone?

As wedding and studio photographers in the North East of England, 2024 was a funny old year. We’ve had lots of new challenges but we’ve also been presented with new opportunities too.

There’s been so much that has happened this year both in the business and in our personal lives.

• We’ve photographed some really cool weddings and we’ve met lots of nice people.
• We’ve photographed lots of babies, dogs and happy toddlers who have all been superstars in our studio.
• We’ve met new clients and also seen returning clients come back once again for another experience.
• We built a brand new photography training platform from scratch and launched our new online photography courses.
• In our personal lives went to Japan, worked on our house and we also went to a few cracking gigs including Tenacious D, Stevie Nicks and Sleep Token.
• It was also 20 years this year since we both met and we also celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary in September.

Thinking back, we’ve had a lovely year.

In the past, we’ve spent 99% of our time photographing weddings and newborns almost exclusively, but this year we diversified into other areas.

• We introduced 1st birthday sessions in the studio
  
• We photographed more elopements and micro weddings
  
• We photographed more engagement shoots for couples whose weddings we weren’t photographing
  
• We did more corporate work
  
• We also did more one-to-one photography training days

Variety has been the spice of life.

Most importantly, we thoroughly enjoyed meeting all the people we met last year. This is at weddings, in the studio and through other avenues. Our clients, their families, their friends. Meeting people has always been a big part of our job satisfaction and we’re pleased to say this year has been one of the best so far. Everyone has been so lovely and they’ve all been very grateful for the work that we do.

Wedding Photography

Let’s start off with the weddings. We photographed 39 weddings in total this year around the Newcastle Upon Tyne, Northumberland, County Durham and Teesside areas. We even travelled to Scotland twice.

What started many months ago back in February at Beamish Hall has been a genuine pleasure ever since. This year’s weddings have been fun and we’ve enjoyed our time with our couples.

Before we go any further, let’s take a moment to give a shout out to our ‘Class of 2024’!

As you can see, our couples all look amazing together and it’s been genuinely heartwarming to spend their wedding days with them. They’ve all been so happy with everything we’ve done for them and equally, we’ve been so grateful that everyone made us feel so welcome.

We visited venues old and new this year including Runa Farm, Ellingham Hall, Doxford Barns, Charlton Hall, Le Petit Chateau, Brinkburn Street Brewery, Newcastle Castle, As You Like It, Halton Grove, Healey Barn, Barn on the Bay, Bowburn Hall, Jesmond Dene House, Newcastle Civic Centre, Lemmington Hall, Blackfriars, Horton Grange, Ramside Hall, Brinkburn Priory, Wylam Brewery, Eshott Hall, Bamburgh Castle, Alnwick Treehouse and Howard Court.

Choc Chip’s 12th Anniversary!

We also celebrated our 12 year anniversary since starting Chocolate Chip Photography. 12 years. Wow, to think how far we’ve come. What started as a “Yeah, let’s see how it goes” turned into something that changed our lives.

Shazia was far less blue haired twelve years ago and Chris was definitely less beardy. It’s been an adventure and we’re looking forward to what the future holds.

Awards and Recognition

When it comes to winning awards, it’s never been the priority for us. The main thing that has always mattered to us is how our couples and families feel about their photographs. Anything else is secondary and in our opinion, that’s the way it should be.

Saying that, we believe success to be a byproduct of hard work and we’ve certainly worked very hard. We’ve been extremely honoured to receive some further recognition for the hard work that we’ve put in this year.

Junebug Weddings 2024 – Best of the Best

In December, one of our images was given an honourable mention in the Junebug ‘Best of the Best’ Wedding Awards for 2024.

To explain this simply, thousands of photographers from around the world submit their best images into the Junebug Wedding Awards and a top 50 images are selected as the Best of the Best in the world.

[ We actually made it into the top 50 in 2021, as well as an additional ‘honourable mention’ that year too. ]

The honourable mentions are an additional 30 images that didn’t quite make the top 50, but are selected to be noteworthy entries. A sort of ‘Top 50-80 images in the world’ if you will.

This image below of Hobie and Rebecca was given an honourable mention for 2024.

We’re very proud of this because the standards are very high among the entries, featuring weddings from all across the globe, so the fact that this image (which was captured in the YuMi arcade in The Gate, Newcastle Upon Tyne) was even selected is a real honour.

Best Photographer Awards

We’ve also received a further two awards for our continued hard work and excellence. This time though, these awards were slightly different than the one above.

Three Best Rated

Firstly, we were named as one of the top three photographers in Newcastle Upon Tyne for the sixth straight year. This was awarded by Three Best Rated, who look at our business more than our images.

While the other photographers occupying in the top three places alongside us have changed since 2017, we’ve kept our place consistantly. We’re proud of this because it shows that our consistent hard work is clearly evident.

Nine Dots Awards

The second award was from Nine Dots as we were named amongst the top 20 photographers of 2023.

All these recognitions are an acknowlegement of our continued hard work and effort we put into running a good business.

Our Studio – Lots of babies… and dogs… and a cat!

It might be news to you, but we actually run a successful photography studio too.

We primarily focus on Newborn Photoshoots, as well as Maternity Photoshoots and 1st Birthday photoshoots too. While many of our clients are returning wedding clients, we have a lot of people passing through our doors who find us elsewhere. After all, people know Chocolate Chip even if they don’t know us.

We’ve had the pleasure of receiving so many nice mums and dads into our studio this year (as with every year), as well as some lovely siblings too. Oh, and did we mention pets?

Yes, we’ve also had lots of dogs pass through our doors as well as one happy kitty who came to visit us.

We mentioned above about choosing to photograph less weddings. Well one of the ways we’ve been able to do that is by having a busy studio. It’s really nice having the balance of photograping in the studio 2 or 3 days a week and then a wedding or two.

Just like the weddings, we’ve had lots of happy mums and dads in the studio. There’s been many happy tears too, which means a plentiful stock of tissues. The really nice thing about 1st birthday sessions is seeing our families returning and seeing my babies grown up that little bit more. It’s genuinley heartwarming.

Photography Training and Workshops

2024 also saw the relaunch of our photography workshops.

We’ve been running our workshops since early 2020 (with a slight break during covid) and they’ve proven to be hugely popular. We did however feel as though there was a better way of doing them, so in November 2023 we decided to take some time to change the format of how the workshops would be ran.

This was a huge undertaking, as we had an entirely new eduction website built where we could host online courses and create a hybrid learning environment for our students. This meant that instead of students spending hours in a room with us looking at powerpoint slides, they could do this at home and then attend the workshops for more “hands on” time with the cameras.

These changes have proven very popular and we’re glad we took the time (10 months to be exact) to get everything set up correctly.

Teaching is something that we really enjoy so having this new online education platform is great. It means we’re now able to create more online courses, provide more value, more course diversity and also reach more people in the future. We’re really looking forward to seeing this evolve moving forward.

You can find more information on our photography training here:

20 years together, 5 years married

Twenty years feels like forever ago. We still remember our first date in a little Italian restaurant in Sunderland which has long since shut down. While it seems twenty years ago, it equally feels like two minutes ago.

A lot has happened since then, including setting up Chocolate Chip back in 2012. A lot of people worry about going into their 30’s but to be honest, we feel our 30’s have been great. We achieved a lot and through it all, including covid, we’ve managed to keep the business going while learning valuable lessons along the way.

Our wedding seems like a blur even though it was five years ago. It’s still nice looking back through our photographs, just like we know our clients love looking back through theirs. Reliving the moments and the positive feelings that come with that is something that cannot be described.

We learnt a lot from getting married ourselves. It made it easier for us to put ourselves in our couple’s shoes, to see things from the perspective of a couple and to see just how quickly a wedding day goes when you’re the centre of attention.

2024 and searching for the Holy Grail

After the post-covid wedding madness of 2021 and 2022, we made a conscious decision to photographs less weddings per year. It had been so busy after covid with all the postponements and it was a lot. We missed out on so much when it came to seeing friends etc and agreed that we needed a better work/life balance, so we decided to go from 60-70 weddings per year down to 35-40.

Less weddings in theory meant more time to take on other types of work too, but also more weekends to ourselves, more time to see friends, attended events and even just head off on days out in the summer.

Our Personal Lives

We spoke above about this mystical work/life balance that we were trying to achieve. Twelve years and we’re still searching for the holy grail. So, how did we do in our quest this year? Did we manage it?

Well we’re pleased to say… Yes. We think so.

Japan

We did a big trip to Japan in September. We’d been planning this trip for a long time and it will certainly be a while now before we do another trip of this magnitude.

We visited Tokyo, Mt Fuji (sort of), Hiroshima, Kyoto and Osaka among many other places. We’ll create a seperate blog about our Japan trip, but here’s a flavour of images in case you’re feeling the need to be inspried to go yourselves.

Camping

You may not know that we’re keen campers too and we like to go away for trips in our TentBox roof tent. In fact, Chris did a road trip down to Disneyland Paris in May this year which he vlogged on his Youtube channel.

I’m sure he’d also appreciate a subscribe to his channel.

Chris turned 40

Now officially an old man, Chris turned 40 this November. He made it clear that he didn’t want to do anything big for his birthday, so we planned a small gathering at the house. Unfortunately it was that weekend in November with the heavy snow blizzard, which threatened to put a hex on the whole thing. Luckily however, it all melted and he had a lovely, chilled day just celebrating at the house playing board games and a mario kart tournement.

This year in summary

It’s been a mixed, well balanced year of hard work, satisfaction and gratification. We’ve been able to have some memorable experiences, both while working and outside of work too.

Running a business is not easy. You never stop working and it’s a constantly moving train that never stops at a station. The great things for us is that we love what we do, which means it doesn’t feel like work to us. We wouldn’t change a thing.

The people we meet play the biggest part. They’re so kind, friendly and welcoming and it’s the people that keep us going.

We look forward to more of the same in 2025.

Happy New Year and all the best from our family to yours.

Chris and Shazia