Wedding Gifts

The digital age has made everything easier.  Remember, for example, when taking photographs meant actually waiting for someone to develop the film, print the pictures and package them in a shiny envelope?  Or when choosing wedding gifts involved the exhausting circulation of a list from which no-one could agree what to buy?  No more.  Pictures are instantaneous, wedding gifts lists get circulated as Excel spreadsheets.

Or how about this?  Instant pictures, as wedding gifts.  Really.  Take a moment to think about it – on the one hand, fourteen fish slices/baking trays/cutlery sets that are never going to get used.  And who wants to give someone a roasting pan as a present anyway?  The days where married couples needed to set up home are long gone.  Married couples already have homes, which they’ve undoubtedly been cohabiting in for years.  No – the best wedding gifts these days are incidental things, things that remind the happy twain where they met, or what their wedding day was like.  What better way to bring that into the digital age than with the delightful idea that guests wedding photos can be combined to make wedding gifts?

Professional wedding photos, by and large, are boring things.  They generally involve predictable staged shots of bride cutting cake, groom and best man raising glass, whole family glowering at a camera from under the shade of a spreading oak.  Real wedding photos, then – the snapshots that everyone else is busy, in this age of the digital shutterbug, taken during every free minute of ceremony, reception and party – provide a uniquely personal record of what is, after all, the signal moment of one’s life.  This makes them absolutely brilliant wedding gifts.

Imagine this:  a website where everyone involved in a wedding can upload their wedding photographs into a virtual “box”.  Like the shoeboxes you kept under the bed, full of incidental snaps, candid shots – memories, in other words, of signal times.  Imagine a slideshow composed of all the best images from a wedding day, available to everyone who was there – a kind of cyber-organic living artwork immortalising the romance, hilarity and good feeling of the day.  In comparison to that, “traditional” wedding gifts seem more than a little staid.