Tips Tuesday - Wedding Tip #4

Wedding Tip #5 is about how not doing a first look could affect your ceremony time. Oh boy. This sounds like I'm trying to talk you into forgoing the big moment of waiting to see each other at the alter and instead doing a first look. I'm not. That is a very personal decision and not one that I care to change your mind about except for one reason - light and the lack of it after your ceremony.

When it comes to my clients I'm all about discussing and managing expectations and this is an area that we sometimes have to talk through. When you wait to see each other until the alter, we have a good chunk of photos that we still have to do after the wedding. I like to do all the photos that we can do separately before the ceremony but we still haven't done your family photos together, your wedding party photos together, and your portraits together. In a perfect world I would like to have 1.5 hrs to do those photos post ceremony. 30 minutes for family photos (herding cats), 30 for wedding party (not as much herding), and then 30 minutes of photos of the two of you. There are always exceptions but for the average wedding, this is pretty standard.

I prefer to do my portraits in natural light whenever possible. I'm capable and do all my reception work with off camera lighting, but I prefer the look of natural light portraits. There are some phenomenal photographers that do it differently but I am not one of them. Now that I've covered myself with the haters I can move on to important stuff.

Generally light starts getting flat 30 minutes before sunset. This means that 2 hours before sunset is when we need to start your post ceremony photos. If you are getting married early in the year or on the other side of daylight savings time, your ceremony might need to be pretty early. Consult your photographer before you send out those invites! We'll dive more into not doing a first look and what else can be done, next week.