With nearly ten years experience photographing weddings we have picked up a number of good ideas along the way! Here are our top ten:
1. Give your guests directions. We’ve all been to enough weddings to know that some churches and reception venues are impossible to find. A good map with well thought out and clear instructions is an absolute must to ensure that everyone arrives on time. Having said that though I have been to several weddings where the guests have had to only walk very short distances and have got completely “lost” in the pub on the way! Also hiring a bus, or even better a vintage bus is a good way of ensuring everyone gets from venue to venue easily and is also a fun and sociable experience for your guests.
2. Ensure that the church, register office or reception venue don’t mind handfuls of confetti being thrown around their entrances. Some might prefer you to use rice or bio diposable confetti – rose petals are a good option and very romantic. A simple check will avoid any bad feeling.
3. Make sure that your reception venue has a suitable cake stand (if needed) and cake knife available. If not bring your own. After all you wouldn’t want to be photographed posing with a steak knife over your cake!
4. Parking. Almost as important as the quality of the food at your reception venue is the availability of parking, especially if the reception is held a long distance from the ceremony. Don’t forget to check the car parking facilities before you book and make sure that, at the time of your reception, the car park won’t be full of cars attending another event.
5. Consider cutting your cake “Hungarian style” – the cake cutting always seems a bit of an anticlimax to me, however, one of the nicest ways of doing it I have come across is for the couple to cut the cake up themselves piece by piece and to serve each guest with a piece as they come to collect it. All very sociable and an idea that also doubles as a kind of receiving line! Unbelievably I was once photographing a wedding at a large hotel who, after the couple had made the first traditional cut in the cake, whisked it away and completely lost it!! Nobody ever found out what happened to it!
6. Make sure you have a nice pen to hand for signing the registar. Nothing looks worse in your photographs than using a cheap biro!
7. When I photograph a wedding I do what I call “fast, fun formals” meaning that the dreaded formal group shots should be short fun and painless! Top tips for organising these are to agree your shot list in advance, have a best man, bridesmaid or usher who knows names and faces to help gather people and to agree on when and where the photographs are going to be taken before hand. Also, rather than compiling a list and then wondering how long it will take to complete, start by deciding how long you want to spend on the shots and then work back from this by asking your photographer how many shots can be achieved in this time. As a rule of thumb I reckon on being able to photograph the bride and groom alone, parent shots, wider family shots, some larger groups such as stag and hen parties or friends and also a whole wedding party shot in 35 to 45 mins.
8. Consider the pros and cons of having the speeches before or after the wedding breakfast. Having them before is often good for the nervous speech makers as they can get it over with and then get on with enjoying their meal however, your guests, when they sit down at their tables, will essentially expect to be fed. They will be less receptive if hungry and are usually in a much better, often alcohol fuelled, mood at the end of the meal. In my experience the speeches are always much more successful after rather than before the wedding breakfast.
9. Have a word with your best man. There is nothing worse than a best man who is not a natural comedian trying to be funny in his wedding speech! Sincerity is always a better option and most of the jokes from the internet “make a speech” website are badly over used. I have heard the “this is not the first time I have risen from a warm seat with a sheet of paper in my hand” joke far too many times in best man speeches this year!
10. And finally, don’t forget to enjoy yourself. If little things go wrong, don’t worry – this is your special day so there should be plenty of people around to put things right. Relax, have a good time and enjoy the start to your married life.
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