Photographer remakes wedding album for couple who lost everything in house fire

A couple who married 20 years ago have received the ultimate gift after losing all their wedding photos when their house burned down.

Marc and Mary Taylor suffered unimaginable tragedy when wildfires tore through thousands of hectares of land across California in 2018, killing more than 80 people and destroying thousands of houses and businesses.

The Taylors lost their home and all their possessions when the largest blaze – the Camp Fire – levelled the region, forcing them to flee to safety.

The couple was left with nothing but each other. In August, they are due to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary but realised they had no photos left to look back on.

Hoping for a miracle, Mary contacted their wedding photographer asking if he kept any images from their special day.

Remarkably, he had.

"They came back to me and said, 'We dug immediately, and we found them. We have them'," Mary told KCRA 3 News.

"And I told Marc, I said, 'Oh my God, they have them.' And so we both started crying.”

"[Mary] comes out and says, 'They're gonna remake the album. And bring it and give it to us. We were just like, 'That just doesn't happen,'" Marc told the news outlet.

Photographer Richard Briggs still had the negatives from the Taylors’ wedding, which took place on August 14, 1999.

"Luckily, they were intact," Briggs said. "They were a little faded. I bought a scanner and scanned them all.

"And my wife, she’s excellent in editing, and she brought back the colour and the life into the photos, and from those images, I was able to make an album."

He's one of the few photographers to keep all the negatives from weddings he's shot since 1985.

Briggs recently presented Marc and Mary with their new wedding album, leaving the couple in tears.

"It gave us a piece of something back after losing everything," Marc said.

In another special twist, the wedding album also contains photos of family and friends who have passed.

"My mum, who died six days before Christmas — to see her pictures in there, her photos, it's just a piece of Mum," Marc said.