Established in 2013 and currently based between Lisbon and Dublin, Magic Chair is the meeting of two minds who are passionate about street photography, cinema and music. Whether we're shooting photography or video, we love the freedom weddings offer us for improvising and experimenting.

For us, this means capturing unstaged moments of you and your guests, in an interesting way. Moments that stay true to the spirit of the day. To do that, we keep a very low profile and we don’t interfere. Our approach for wedding photography and video is basically the same. You may also see documentary wedding photography described as “street”, “photojournalistic”, “natural” or “unposed”.

Our approach for both photo and video is very “hands off”. We rely on natural light (no flash) and use silent, handheld equipment in order to be as unobtrusive as possible. You can simply forget about us and immerse yourself in celebration!

We are based in Portugal and are lucky to call Ireland our second home. If you’re looking for documentary wedding photography in Portugal, Spain, Ireland or beyond we want to hear from you!

Travel is usually free within Portugal.  Please contact us with your locations for an exact quote.

We sure can! We can arrange a video call or voice call, whichever you prefer!

Rory usually shoots solo but Catarina is also available as a second shooter for larger weddings.  We always edit together as a team, never outsourcing our work. We love having complete control over our creative process. Rory is usually the one behind emails and the bureaucratic stuff!

Our default photography style is documentary but we are more than happy to take any portraits you would like! We can usually wrap these up within 30 minutes so you can get back to the party! It helps a lot if we have the list of any group shots in advance.

That’s up to you but we would love to surprise you with something you’ve never heard before.   We really enjoy finding that perfect soundtrack to complement the footage.  If you prefer to pick specific songs for your wedding video – no problem!

We usually soundtrack our wedding videos with music only.  This gives us the maximum creative freedom to convey the mood and feel of your day.  If you would like to hear the natural audio from your day – we also offer full speeches and raw footage as separate add-ons.

We are perfectionists and our craft takes time. Wedding photographs are usually delivered within 3 weeks.  Wedding videos are a lot more labour and edits can take up to 3 months.

We always carry multiple camera bodies, lenses and more memory cards than we need. If either of us can’t make it for some reason, we will find a suitable replacement to fill in for shooting (we would still edit everything in our style)