This is it! The moment you’ve been waiting for. It’s easy to get lost in all the planning and stress, all the bells and whistles. But try to keep in mind the most important thing – which is the official start of your lives together.

Our general approach to how we capture ceremonies is this: We want to capture things as thoroughly as we can WITHOUT making ourselves the center of attention. We’ll typically have a photographer or videographer at the front of the aisle trying to get two main shots: the bride walking down the aisle, and the look on their partner’s face when they see them for the first time. Then we’re gonna be out of your hair.

There will be times when the ceremony site, or the angle of the bridal party, means that we can’t get those shots. In those times we’re just gonna do our best to get the photos that we can get from the angles we do have available. We’ve been shooting weddings for a long time, so you’ll just have to trust that if we didn’t get that shot, there’s a good reason why!

Lighting

You’ll hear me say “lighting” a million times, but here it is again. Keeping lighting in mind, the best time to start your ceremony (photo-wise) is about 3 hours before the sunset. The lower the sun is, the better the lighting.

However, I highly recommend AGAINST doing a sunset ceremony for a few reasons. If you’re not doing a first look then that means we’re left to do the formal photos (like family, bridal party and couples photos) in the dark. While some photographers excel at doing dramatic photos with artificial lighting, that’s not our style here. I’d prefer to use that dreamy sunset light for romantic bridals.

Unplugged ceremony

We’ve all seen those photos circulating on social media of guests moving to the aisle at the last minute, holding full sized ipads and blocking the photographers from getting the shot of the first kiss, or preventing the groom from seeing the bride walk down the aisle.

If you’d like for guests to put their phones away, it’s helpful to ask the officiant to make an announcement at the beginning of the ceremony. We do recommend an unplugged ceremony, but we don’t mandate it. I’m not about to cause a scene and fight aunt Fran in the middle of your wedding ceremony because she’s recording the entire thing on her phone, you know what I mean?

Advice for better photos

When walking down the aisle, ask your wedding party to walk slowly and confidently — we’ll be snapping lots of pics of them during this time.

If you don’t want your officiant in the background during your first kiss, you can ask them ahead of time if they don’t mind stepping to the side.

Hold your first kiss for a few seconds to make sure we can get the shot — this isn’t the time to be peckish!

After the officiant announces you and you walk back down the aisle, we’ll ask you to stop and kiss again at the end of the aisle.