How to Get Amazing Wedding Photos Without Missing Your Wedding

When you spend months planning your wedding, you should actually enjoy your wedding. While wedding photos are an extremely important part of the wedding day, getting great photographs shouldn’t require missing the thing you hired someone to photograph.

Your wedding day isn't a photoshoot.

Here’s how to make sure it doesn't turn into one.

Decide What Is Most Important

When most people think about wedding photography, their vision usually goes to the couple’s portraits first. And that makes a lot of sense: of course you want incredible photographs of the two of you. We want you to have this, too.

But think about what else you believe are the most important moments of your wedding day: Your friends seeing you for the first time. The people who traveled across the country to be there. Someone telling a story during a speech. Your grandmother on the dance floor. Your best friend laughing so hard she can't breathe..

Those moments are your wedding photos, too.

Build the Photography Around the Wedding, Not the Other Way Around

In the weeks leading up to the wedding, as the timeline comes together, it can almost start to resemble an event production schedule. Hair and make-up. Getting ready photos. Detail photos.  First look. Couple portraits. Wedding party portraits. Family portraits. Golden-hour portraits. Reception room photos.

Individually, none of these things sounds unreasonable. In fact, most couples want the entirety of the day documented. But stack them together, though, and suddenly you've built a wedding day around taking photographs.

We prefer to do the opposite.

Whenever we work with our couples to build a wedding timeline, we start by understanding the experience you want.

Do you want a relaxed morning with your friends? Great.

Do you want to actually attend your cocktail hour? Let's protect that.

Do you want to spend most of the reception on the dance floor? We support this decision.

Then we figure out how photography fits around those priorities, not how those priorities fit around photography.

Be Realistic About the Photos You'll Actually Care About

Pinterest can be dangerous. Not because inspiration is bad, but because it's very easy to start believing you need photographs you never actually wanted.

The perfectly arranged shoes, the champagne spray, the elaborate flat lay, or the fifteen different combinations of bridesmaids and groomsmen.

If those photographs genuinely matter to you, absolutely make time for them.

But don't give up thirty minutes of your wedding because you think you're supposed to have them.

There is no required wedding photo checklist.

Your photographs should tell the story of your wedding.

You May Not Need as Much Portrait Time as You Think

Beautiful portraits don't have to take forever, and good planning helps. So does an experienced photographer who can recognize good light, moments, and backdrops quickly and doesn't need 47 versions of essentially the same photograph.

We'll give you direction when you need it, and we'll make sure you have photographs with the people who matter to you. But we're not interested in turning your wedding into an endless series of setups.

At some point, we want to send you back to your party, because that's where the good stuff is happening.

Keep Family Photos Organized

There is one part of the day where a little structure goes a very long way: family photographs.

These can either be quick and painless or somehow become a 45-minute exercise in locating Uncle Bob. The difference is planning: decide ahead of time which combinations genuinely matter. Make sure the people involved know when and where they're needed.Then we can move through them efficiently and get everyone back to celebrating.

This is actually one of those times when we want to take control, in order to stay focused and move swiftly through these formalities. 

Documentary photography doesn't mean refusing to organize anything. It means understanding when direction improves your experience and when it interrupts it.

Think Twice Before Giving Away Your Cocktail Hour

Cocktail hour is one of our favorite parts of a wedding.

The post-ceremony excitement and friends and family making connections is a perfect time for you to transition from formalities to fun.

In other words, exactly the kind of environment where great documentary photographs happen.

And yet couples are often scheduled to miss the entire thing. Sometimes that's necessary, and sometimes it's exactly what a couple wants, but it shouldn't be automatic.

If being at cocktail hour matters to you, tell your photographer. There are ways to structure portraits and family photographs so you can actually enjoy at least some of it. in other words, you are allowed to attend your own party

Hire a Photographer Whose Priorities Match Yours

Wedding photographers work very differently.

Some are highly involved throughout the day. They create and direct much of what they photograph. For couples who love that experience and want highly constructed imagery, that can be exactly right.

Others work more observationally, capturing moments as they happen, quietly and unobtrusively..

Neither is inherently “better”, but the experience is different.

So when you're choosing a photographer, don't just ask yourself:

Do I like these pictures?

Ask:

What had to happen to make these pictures?

How much time was spent creating them? How much direction was involved? How often was the couple pulled away from their guests?

And most importantly:

Is that how I want to spend my wedding day?

The Goal Isn't Just Great Wedding Photos

We want you to have photographs that still take your breath away over twenty years from now. But we also want you to have a wedding worth remembering.

The two shouldn't be in competition.

You should be able to eat the food you chose, drink the signature cocktail you named, hug the people who traveled to see you, and dance when your favorite song comes on.

We'll be there: watching, anticipating, and photographing it.

Because the best way to get photographs that actually feel like your wedding is pretty simple: go enjoy your wedding, we'll take care of the pictures.