Consulting The Photographer Before Your Wedding

It's been my policy to contact my clients on the Sunday before their wedding. We go over all the details of the wedding again because often things change between the time we first met and the actual wedding date. Plus waiting until the week of the wedding helps me from confusing the details of this wedding from other weddings I may have earlier.

But I also encourage my clients to contact me first to go over how to plan the schedule of events for their weddings. Surprisingly very few clients do this. Why is this important? Well, let's say you want a lot of very unique portraits of yourself but don't plan enough time before the ceremony to do this (or after the ceremony). It then becomes impossible to get those shots simply because of poor planning.

Too often, I've been given only one half hour to shoot all the formals after the wedding and then we must rush to get to the reception which is far away from the church. Well, although I shoot quickly, it's really the groups of people being photographed that slow us down. Gathering them together and moving them into position takes time. Factor in the many groups that must be photographed and you can see how one half hour may be a little tight in time. Then add in all those unique portraits of the bride, the groom, the bridal party, etc. and you can see that a single half hour simply isn't going to be enough.

But, if the photographer is consulted well BEFORE the schedule is fixed, it would be easy to find out how much time should be alloted for in this planning. Then, all of the photos you want can be taken without the fear of rushing.

I encourage everyone to do this before you send out your invitations to let everyone know what time the wedding and reception is to start. Don't rely on a book to give you basic guidelines on how much time to allow for things. Working directly with the actual photographer and other wedding vendors is much better since everyone has their own way of doing things and know from past experience how much time they need to accomplish it.

Give me a call and we can plan out your day!