Your wedding timeline should be a direct reflection of what you care about most. If that’s three hours of detail shots, two hours of posed portraits, and an hour of golden hour portraits that’s fine, but most people have spent so long looking forward to marrying their spouse that they’d actually like to spend some time with them As you build out your team for your day, look for a photographer that can prioritize the people and events you care about most time-wise so that you can actually spend some time with the person you’re marrying. Of course time, like money has to be budgeted, and there will be some things that can’t be shortened, but generally, the more experienced a photographer is, the less time they’ll need to take you away from your wedding day for pictures.
It’s your wedding day. You’ve planned for weeks, months, or perhaps even years. You’ve been to weddings before, but this one’s different, it’s yours. You’re ready for your vows, your significant other turns around to see you for the first time and you hear… “Okay, can do that again? I’ve gotta change my battery. Hang on.” Weddings aren’t easy, and the first 100 times you photograph one, you’re mainly just getting lucky and hoping nothing goes wrong. The truth is while every wedding day may feel perfect, finding a photographer that can accurately portray those emotions is a tricky task. You want to relive every emotion from your wedding day for years to come. Hiring a photographer who doesn’t have the foresight to know how to handle a delayed timeline, missing family members, bad weather, or countless other scenarios, will very likely put you in my shoes. With 60 out of focus pictures that don’t tell any piece of the incredible story that my wedding day was or the impact, it had at the start of my marriage.
Only a portion of a wedding day happens in natural light, and as beautiful as a golden hour sunset can be, there’s a very good chance that the sunset isn’t going to last the full 10 hours that your wedding day will take. When you look for a photographer, you want someone that can use natural light well, but you also want someone that understands when additional light is required and how to use it in a way that still feels natural.
The number one trap inexperienced photographers use to ‘build a portfolio’ is to fake it. Usually with images from fake wedding shoots known as styled shoots. There’s nothing wrong with taking pictures for fun, or pictures designed to look particularly pretty, but the most important thing to remember is that they’re not real. When you’re looking for a photographer make sure they show you multiple, full, wedding galleries so you know what to expect from the photographer under the stress of a wedding day, and not just what they can create under ideal conditions with models.
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