Meet Sarah and Darren Hendry | Photographers

We had the good fortune of connecting with Sarah and Darren Hendry and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Sarah and Darren, what role has risk played in your life or career?
Sometimes risks most definitely pay off! For example, the most substantial risk we’ve ever taken was moving our business, and lives, over to Los Angeles from Scotland. LA, and California in general, is somewhere we’ve always loved to visit, ever since making our first trip over here in 2009. It just resonated with us on so many levels, we can’t really explain! But we always knew living here full-time was going to be a completely different monster, with acquiring work and clients from the other side of the ocean, building up our business SEO from scratch again, making connections with other people within our field, and basically starting afresh and relearning life in a new part of the world (health care and taxes, we’re looking at you mostly!). In our minds, we knew it was now or never, so we took the plunge and started the visa process. Fast forward 4 years later, and we know we made the right decision. It’s been a tough, but very rewarding, few years. It’s also helped really move our creativity along that extra bit, and we take a lot of inspiration from urban and natural environments here which really differ from what we experienced back home.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
Our journey into the world of wedding photography started back in 2011. Prior to that, we were shooting portraits, music shows and architectural stuff (Darren has a degree in Architecture) as a hobby, and we were starting to get slightly bored, not to mention, our lack of creativity was failing us. We randomly put a photography advert on Gumtree (UK version of Craigslist!) and secured our first ever paid booking after a few days, which happened to be a wedding which we were a little surprised about since that type of photography had never really interested us! Since then, we have never looked back and have been doing wedding photography full-time for 10 years now. Not something we ever planned on doing, but it just worked out like that! It sounds slightly clichéd but getting to travel the world and meet loads of new people along the way has been totally inspiring, and ultimately changed the way we were as people. We have since been evolving creatively every day and this way of thinking has kept our minds fresh and our eyes wide open, and we’re always looking for new ways to express ourselves with our imagery. Now we have no problem with stepping out of our creative boundaries and changing it up at every wedding or shoot we’re part of. We hope this is the thing that sets us apart from others! One lesson we still need to learn is to quit being so self-conscious about ourselves and our work, and not compare ourselves to our peers and the people within our industry. It’s a tough ol’ thing to master, but we’re slowly getting there!

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
That’s a tough one because there are so many spots we love around the many cities that make up LA! But here’s a rough synopsis of some of our favorite things to do: hiking in Griffith Park, wandering around Silver Lake, driving through the mountains up the 2, dropping by some of the many record stores (Cosmic Vinyl is our newest and favorite find!), eating out at Vibe, Pura Vita, or Sage (the ultimate vegan grub spots!), grabbing at matcha latte at Moon Juice, catching the sunset up on Mulholland Drive, and nerding out at the Natural History Museum.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Our first shoutout would be to our awesome clients – we wouldn’t be where we are today without them! They trusted us to capture important key events in their lives and for that, we are eternally grateful. We would also like to mention a certain few photography organizations, blogs, and businesses that have either showcased our work, provided us with a key opportunity, or given us awards over the years. Namely, Rangefinder (https://www.rangefinderonline.com) who named us one of their Top 30 Rising Stars in 2016; Junebug Weddings who included our images in the Top 50 Best Wedding Photos in both 2019 and 2020; and Paul Santos (https://www.paulsantosphotography.com) who asked us to be a part of his photography workshop in 2018, and very kindly supported us during our US visa process.

Website: https://thehendrys.co

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_hendrys

Image Credits
The Hendrys