Hey everyone! I thought that I would spend some time writing about ways you can ensure that you get great images on your wedding day. Hopefully these tips will help you organize your formal wedding images so that you get the images you and your family want. A wedding can be an opportunity to photograph family and friends that haven’t seen each other in years.
Weddings are usually full of surprises and can be stressful at times. The best way to get the images you want of your family, friends, and most importantly you and your partner involves a little bit of planning before the wedding. Spend some time with your wedding photographer talking about the quantity of formal images that you want before the wedding. You are paying them to help you and together you should be able to come up with a game plan to make the formals a breeze.
Make sure that you have scheduled enough time for your formal images. When calculating how much time you should assign for family formals, estimate that each shot will take 1-2 minutes. That may seem like a lot of time per photo, but in reality guests get distracted very easily. Rounding up people, posing them, and getting them to focus on the wedding photographer is what takes up time.
Make a list! Spend some time thinking about who you want to be included in the formal images. Once that list is made, start thinking of the different combinations of people that you want in each image. During the hustle and bustle of your wedding day, it can be very easy to forget some important people that you want pictures of. Having an organized list will avoid heartache after the wedding. Once you have made your list you should start organizing it. Do a list for the bride’s family, a list for the groom’s family, and a list for both families together. Put the names of each individual for each image on that list.
Before the wedding, designate a person from both the bride’s side and the groom’s to be in charge of organizing the formals. This can be someone from the wedding party, a cousin, or a close friend of the family that knows everyone. This will help the formal images run quickly and smoothly. Have the designated person round up the right people for each shot. While your photographer is taking the photo, that person can be rounding up the people for the next image.
You should ask your guests to avoid taking pictures while the photographer is photographing. When guests are taking pictures behind the photographer, your formal photos will be filled with people blinking (because of other flashes going off), and people looking in different directions. It is also very distracting for both the photographer and the people being photographed and can make the formal images take much longer than anticipated.
Your guests can always order the formal images directly from your photographer, or if you are getting a dvd of your images you can offer to email them the images they want. If you have enough time allotted for family formals, you can ask your photographer to let guests take images once the photographer has finished each formal. This will increase the amount of time needed for images, but can make your guests happy.
When it comes to the formal images of the bride and groom, whenever possible try to go somewhere away from family and friends. This is a time where you should be totally focused on your partner. When other people are standing around the couple you will sometimes have a hard time displaying your true emotions. These emotions are what make great wedding day images! Your wedding photographer wants to capture the love, passion, affection and trust that you have for each other, and other people standing around or taking photos can hinder this. We don’t want you to be distracted. Your focus should be aimed at your new husband or wife!
Hopefully these tips and ideas will help you to make your formal images run quickly and smoothly. If you have any questions or want to see other topics discussed on our blog please email us. We look forward to hearing from you!
Melanie