Wedding at the Chapel Heidelberg: Lena & Jairo

Wedding celebration at the Chapel in Heidelberg’s Südstadt

The Chapel is a special place for a wedding: built in 1951 as a church for members of the American armed forces, right in the middle of what is now Mark Twain Village in the Südstadt, and a community centre with a large hall since 2021. At the end of May 2026 Lena and Jairo celebrated here, beneath the colourful windows with their English inscriptions, the gallery and the timber trusses under the ceiling.

If you’d like to celebrate there: the large hall seats just over a hundred guests at tables, and in front of the entrance there’s a double staircase that’s just made for a group photo.

Light from tall windows

The Chapel makes life easy for a photographer. Plenty of daylight falls into the hall through the tall windows, and when the sun comes in from the side, the coloured panes cast their colours onto the walls and window reveals. I started while the hall was still empty, with the tables laid, shooting with the wide-angle from right in the centre, so you see the whole room once before the guests spread out in it.

I developed the pictures bright and airy, with soft colours. That suits the room, and the strong colours then glow where they belong: in the windows, on the cake and in the skirts on the dance floor.

In the thick of it, but at a distance

As a wedding photographer, I prefer to work the way I would on a reportage: I observe rather than shuffle people around. For that I had two cameras with me, one with a telephoto for the moments and one with a wide-angle for the room. That way I never have to change lenses just as something is happening, and I can stand well back without losing the faces.

I often photograph through something, past a shoulder or through ivy. The blurred bit in the foreground gives the picture depth, and you feel as if you’re standing among the guests yourself.

I only used flash for the dancing in the evening. By then it’s getting darker, the skirts are twirling, and the flash freezes the movement. And at the end, the one picture with everyone in it: the whole party on the double staircase, shot with the wide-angle and stopped down far enough that everyone is sharp, from the children at the front to the door at the top.