Every Bride and Groom want spectacular images from there wedding day. Here are some tips that will help you achieve this. I hope you take the time to read through this page and give these tips some thought. I guarantee this will help you and your photographer create beautiful images that you will be able to look back on for a lifetime.

 

Thomas

 

Group Photos

Group photos are not required  wedding photography but they seem to be a necessary part of almost every wedding. You have to keep the parents and families happy with these traditional portraits. While you’re thinking about groups……like possibly now……hint hint…… make a list of who is in each shot. Having a list makes everything go so much smoother. Tell all your relatives (in advance) that they should be there at a certain time, then tell them again on the wedding day. Waiting for the missing person is the only thing that keeps group shots from taking more than about 20 minutes.

Make Time for Pictures

Plan on spending at LEAST 1/2 hour shooting couple portraits. Ideally, that time should BEGIN about 20 minutes before the sun goes below the horizon and then last another 20 minutes or so afterwards. I would consider 20 minutes to be the absolute minimum for this photo shoot. If you can plan more time… the more the better. This is especially true if you are getting married in a location that has a lot of variety with different locations for us to move around in. Dramatic backgrounds are great for this photo shoot but many things will work…. a forest, field of flowers, old buildings, barns, rocky riversides, meadow, city streets, college campus, city park, etc. Please don’t plan your couple portraits for the middle of the day unless you absolutely have to. Early morning and late evening light have the best light and mid day is the worst. Also, if at all possible, and I know I may be smacked for this, if you can meet your groom prior to the ceremony, we could accomplish some beautifully photography without the hustle and bustle  once the events start. We can arrange a meeting, photograph the meeting, then go on and do a romantic portrait session. 

Decorate the Bride’s Dressing Room

This almost always gets overlooked in the planning and decorating phase. First start by picking a room with some ROOM. One with lots of natural light. And use light gauzy fabrics over the windows instead of thick curtains or shutters that cut out all the light. Having nothing on the windows looks almost as bad as too much. Decorate the girls dressing room just as carefully as you would any other part of the wedding location. And cover up anything ugly with curtains or drape cloth. Clean the room prior to the photography, such as piles of clothes on the floor, fast food wrappers and bags, shopping bags…….etc. Don’t try to make it look too neat though, messes are ok if they are wedding messes. Empty boxes and bags should be placed somewhere outside the dressing room. It looks wonderful to have all the dresses hanging around and shoes lying around on the floor, but they look awful if they are still in the box or if they have piles of plastic wrappers and cardboard boxes lying next to them. Flowers also look much better in some sort of vases instead of the cardboard boxes the florist packed them in.

Lighting the Girls Dressing Room

If you have no window light, think romance! Get creative. Try lots of candles or little christmas lights placed on and under things. You can’t have too much window light. However, you should try to avoid having direct sunlight streaming into the windows. If you have direct sun, pick some curtains that are a little thicker to diffuse it. You can also put light cotton cloth over the outside of the window in order to cut down the direct sun. Or better yet, pick a room with windows facing north so you don’t have problems with direct sunlight at all.

Photos in the Dressing Room

If you are modest, of course I will leave the room whenever you ask, in fact I don’t enter a room without permission,  but personally I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Some of the best images from the entire wedding happen in the dressing room and especially when the dress is actually going over the bride’s head with the mother of the bride and all the bridesmaids helping to get it on. If you have your photographer wait outside when this is happening you will miss one of the most beautiful (and important) events of the entire day. Remember, with photography, its easy to delete things later, but its impossible to turn back time and do it again. Will the dressing pictures show up on my website? My policy is this… if it shows more than what could be seen if you were in a swimsuit, then I would never show it. If there are any partially clothed images, I can always put those on a seperate disk for the bride and grooms personal collection.

Light the Reception

I do not like having a black background for dancing photos. A little bit if light in the background makes a huge difference. Christmas lights and hanging bulbs and rope lights all look good in the background especially if you hang them just above head high. If you are having an outdoor reception, placing your dance floor under a tent will make a world of difference because we can bounce our flash up into the tent roof and make a much more even light than what we would get with direct flash. A tent also gives you a structure to hang the small lights in the roof which create a mellow warm background light. Outdoors… paper lanterns are beautiful and mason jars with candles inside look wonderful hanging in the trees.