Palácio de Queluz Wedding in Lisbon | Alison & Matthew
Before we begin...
The couple: Alison & Matthew
The date: September 4th 2025
The venue: Palácio Nacional de Queluz, Sintra, Portugal
The guest count: 89 of their favorite humans gathered in one of Portugal's most beautiful palaces.
The dress code: Formal, with an effortless feel. Pink was reserved for the wedding party.
The main character fave moment: First look before the ceremony. Soft, emotional and worth every second.
The unexpected favourite detail: Their wedding website. Reading the little story of how they met before the day made me feel like I was arriving to celebrate friends rather than meeting strangers.
Some weddings I’m excited to photograph. Some weddings I am borderline INSUFFERABLE about because I’ve been waiting for them for months. Alison and Matthew’s was the latter.
By the time their wedding at Palácio Nacional de Queluz finally arrived, we’d been planning and talking for almost a year. We’d hopped on video calls, talked about Portugal, timelines, family, the vision they had for the day, shared Pinterest boards and somewhere along the way, they also casually mentioned that they were huge Taylor Swift fans, which is obviously extremely important information for your wedding photographer to have, specially if they’re also swifties!
A few days before their wedding, I was doing one final scroll through their wedding website to double-check names and faces when I got completely distracted reading the story of how they met. It was funny, self-aware and so completely them that I ended up sitting there smiling at my laptop instead of doing whatever Very Important Wedding Photographer Task™ I had originally opened the website for.
It made me realise how much I love those tiny breadcrumbs couples leave throughout their wedding day and Alison and Matthew's wedding had their fingerprints all over it.
Getting ready for a wedding at Palácio Nacional de Queluz
The morning started on two very different frequencies. Matthew was all quiet concentration, getting into his tux, fixing the final details and looking remarkably calm for someone who was about to get married. Alison’s morning was a little more lively: matching pink pyjamas, mimosas, music, bridesmaids everywhere and the kind of happiness that comes with getting ready surrounded by your favorite people.
Then came the dress, her mum helping with the final details, jewelry going on and that first reveal to her bridesmaids, which resulted in exactly the level of screaming and emotional faces you’d hope for with Taylor Swift playing in the background!
And somewhere between all of that, it stopped feeling like a morning of getting ready and started feeling very real: Alison and Matthew were actually getting married.
So, obviously, our next stop would be the palace.
The first look
One of my favourite parts of Alison and Matthew's entire day happened before the ceremony had even begun.
They decided to have a first look inside the palace, away from their guests and before everything properly kicked off, and I will happily continue campaigning for first looks for the rest of my career. Not because everyone has to do one, but because weddings are beautifully chaotic things and there aren't many moments during the day when the two people actually getting married get to exist completely on their own.
For a few minutes there was no ceremony waiting, no guest list, no timeline and nobody needing anything from them. It was just Alison walking towards Matthew and the two of them getting to properly see each other for the first time.
And LOOK AT THEM. This is also where knowing my couples beforehand makes such a difference to the way I photograph them. By this point, Alison and Matthew weren't two people I'd just met and immediately needed to make comfortable in front of a camera. We'd already spent months talking, laughing and planning together, so I wasn't trying to manufacture a moment between them. I could just give them space, step in when they needed a little direction and otherwise watch what happened.
Which, conveniently, involved them being extremely cute.
Wedding portraits around Palácio Nacional de Queluz
One thing I hear constantly is some version of “We're really awkward in photos”, usually delivered with the seriousness of someone confessing to an international crime.
I promise you do not need to know how to pose.
My favourite photographs of Alison and Matthew aren't the ones where every hand is technically perfect or everybody is looking exactly where they're “supposed” to. They're the ones where Matthew is looking at Alison while she's doing something else, where one of them makes the other laugh halfway through a photograph, or where they've forgotten about me for approximately four seconds and I get to sneak in and steal the evidence.
As for the formals, the palace does a lot of the visual heavy lifting, so I just had to gather the important people and help pose a little.
Because that was really the magic of this day: so many different parts of Alison and Matthew’s lives suddenly existing in the same place. Friends from one chapter, family from another, people who hadn’t seen each other in years and people meeting for the first time, all somehow ending up together in Portugal because these two fell in love.
As the afternoon turned into evening, the formal part softened, drinks appeared, conversations spilled across the gardens and everyone settled into that lovely point of a wedding where the timeline starts mattering a little less and being together starts mattering a lot more.
That's probably my favorite thing about photographing destination weddings. The couple is obviously the reason everyone came, but itall becomes part of something bigger. People have travelled and they're staying for a few days. They're discovering somewhere new together. Dinner lasts longer, nobody is in quite as much of a hurry and the wedding starts feeling less like an event everyone attended and more like a shared vacation.
After spending most of the afternoon outside, we slipped back into the palace walking through rooms filled with chandeliers, enormous mirrors, painted ceilings and marble floors. Dinner was coming together. The tables were set, flowers and candles were placed and the palace slowly shifted from somewhere we had been exploring all afternoon into a place they were about to sit down, eat, drink, make speeches and celebrate Alison and Matthew properly.
By the time everyone came inside, the light was warmer, the chandeliers were glowing and the whole place felt different again.
Alison and Matthew entered dinner and went straight into their first dance, surrounded by everyone they love in one of the most beautiful rooms in the palace. And I think that was the point where the day shifted a little. The nerves were gone, they were married, everyone had a drink in front of them and there was nowhere else anyone needed to be.
Dinner was long and happy and loud in the way a wedding dinner should be, with conversations travelling across tables. Then came the speeches, which were equal parts sweet, hilarious and mildly dangerous depending on who had the microphone. Watching their faces through them might have been even better than listening: the laughing, the teary eyes, all of it.
They cut the cake and then everyone moved outside and somewhere along the way this very elegant palace wedding became a full-on PARTY. Alison dancing in her second dress (that was so cool!) with a bouquet in one hand and a drink in the other tells you most of what you need to know. The dance floor was packed, everyone was sweaty and happy, and nobody seemed particularly interested in calling it a night.
And for supper they had Noodles and Natas. WIN!
A wedding that felt completely like them
When I finally sat down to edit this gallery, I realised I kept smiling at my screen for exactly the same reason I'd smiled while reading their wedding website before the wedding.
Of course it was beautiful. They got married in Palácio Nacional de Queluz. One of my favorite venues in Sintra. But the photographs I kept coming back to were the ones where I could see them. The laughs, their families, the way they looked at each other, all the little interactions that nobody could have planned in advance and the tiny pieces of personality threaded through the day. That's what makes me care about a wedding years later.
If you're planning your own wedding, whether it's at Palácio de Queluz, somewhere else in Portugal or in a completely different corner of the world, my biggest piece of unsolicited advice is to make it feel unmistakably like the two of you. Tell people your story. Put the weird little reference in there. Choose the song you actually love. Write the wedding website nobody may read because your photographer apparently will. Keep the tradition you care about and happily ignore the one you don't.
The photographs will be beautiful because you two were incredibly happy (and happy people are oh so beautiful!) and they'll mean everything to you because the day was yours.
And Alison and Matthew's really, really was.
Planning your own destination wedding in Portugal?
If you're currently somewhere between “maybe we should get married in Portugal?” and 37 open tabs containing palaces, quintas, hotels and increasingly ambitious Pinterest boards, hello. You're exactly the kind of person I love hearing from.
I photograph weddings throughout Portugal and abroad and the part I love begins long before I turn up with my cameras. I want to know who you are, what you're planning, what matters to you, what absolutely does not matter to you and what you want this whole thing to feel like when you look back at it years from now.
So if Palácio Nacional de Queluz is currently sitting somewhere in your browser tabs, or you've found another little corner of Portugal that feels like yours, come tell me everything.
Preferably including how you met. I'm very invested in that now.
