Families ask about this carefully and often awkwardly. There is nothing awkward about the answer, so here it is in plain words.
About half the families who ring us about a wedding ask some version of this question, and most of them ask it carefully, as though it might be a difficult request. It is not a difficult request and it is the easiest part of our job to explain, so here is the whole arrangement.
A ladies function is photographed by a lady. Two of our four photographers are women and one of them covers the floor for the entire function, from the build until the last guest leaves. Not somebody who looks in, and not somebody who is mostly covering the other side. Her name is on the quotation before you pay a deposit, because a family is entitled to know who is coming rather than discovering it at seven o'clock.
No male member of our team enters the function at all, and that includes carrying equipment. In practice this means her second camera body, her spare batteries and her lighting go in before the guests arrive, and if something is needed later she goes and gets it herself. It sounds like a small logistical point and it is the one people are most reassured to hear, because it is the thing that usually goes wrong at studios who mean well.
If the ladies function and the mens function run at the same hour, that is two photographers and we quote it as two. What we will not do is take a single photographer's fee and send one person to move between two rooms, which produces poor coverage of both and requires somebody to walk through a function they should not be in.
Then permission, which is the part that matters most. Nothing from a ladies function is ever published by us. Not on our website, not on our social pages, not in a printed sample we show another client. That holds even when the person who booked us is happy for it, because the permission for a photograph of a lady has to come from her, and at a function of two hundred guests we have not asked two hundred people and never will.
The visible consequence is that our public gallery holds almost nothing from the weddings we are proudest of. Clients occasionally point this out as though it were a weakness. It is the opposite, and the honest way to judge any photographer is to ask them to sit you down in their studio and show you a complete set from one wedding rather than a selection from twenty.
Everything you receive is yours. The full edited set, the raw files if you want them, and no conditions on what you do with them. What we do with them is nothing, unless you write to us and say otherwise.