We love to be part of the wedding day timeline planning! We’ve been to hundreds of weddings at this point and we’re more than happy to share ideas and make recommendations from the perspective of getting you the photos you want. Here are some of our considerations we like to talk through, which can help you build your timeline if you’re just getting started. Some venues will provide a general structure that works well there, and you may also have a planner, who we’d be happy to collaborate with as well.
We often find that the timeline planning starts from the ceremony start time. Then we work backwards until we decide on when we should arrive. One of the first considerations is whether you’ll be doing a “first look” or not. A first look is when the couple first sees each other on the wedding day. Some people want this to be walking down the aisle, some like to try to do all of the portraits before the ceremony even starts. It’s totally up to you and we can do either way.
Some pros of doing a first look include getting some special time for the two of you to connect on your wedding day before the day really takes off. We can do a good amount of photos of you two then as well as the wedding party, which decompresses the timeline post ceremony, if your goal is to spend as much time with your guests as possible. How this often looks is planning to do the first look about 90 minutes before the ceremony. Having about 60 minutes do do a first look, couple portraits, and a few wedding party arrangements is ideal. Then we like to have you all tucked away and chilling for at least 30 minutes before the ceremony. Immediately post ceremony, we usually do the family formals while they’re all gathered together. We have some specific advice on family formals here. Then, we do still like to do some portraits with you two, maybe 15-20 minutes to capture that post-married glow. Alternatively, we can plan to steal the two of you away in the 15 minutes before sunset to make some amazing golden hour portraits (our favorite).
If you’d like to first see each other down the aisle (which is what we did!) we love that too! The photos of each of your first seeing each other while surrounded by all of your closest people are priceless. In that case, we still do like to fit in some portraits of each side of the wedding party separately. This can often be accomplished with good timing, whether y’all are getting ready in the same place or not. Since you’ll have both of us there capturing your day, we can divide and conquer. In this case, we’ll do family formals immediately post ceremony, followed by couple and wedding party portraits. In this situation, we’re often given about an hour to work with, but it does depend greatly on 1) how large the family is or how many different arrangements we’ll be doing, 2) the cooperation of the family, 3) how large your wedding party is and 4) how many different scenes you’d like to work with the wedding party for. Please check out this page for more on family formals, as in 75% of timeline crunch cases that happen on wedding days, it’s because family formals went long. We’d love to help you avoid any stress with that!
Ok, so now that we have the ceremony time set, portrait time set, we’ll continue to work back to see when hair and makeup will be done and everybody will be dressed and ready. You’ll want to consult with your hair and make up artists for how long it will take, which is also highly dependent on how many people are using their services and how many artists will be present. We generally show up in the final 60 minutes of getting ready, so we can capture finishing touches, building excitement, dress and jewelry details, etc. We find people get photoed out if we’re there in the morning for too long, so 1 hour usually works out best. This gives us our start time with you on your wedding day.
If you’re booked with our unlimited package and have a sendoff planned, we’ll be hanging out with you for the whole reception. We’ll be around to capture all of your planned events, which aside for trying to save the 15 minutes up to sunset, we don’t really have a preference with timeline. Most likely, your DJ will be most involved with this part of the timeline planning. Just let us know what you come up with so we can be ready on the day. We tend to taper down our shooting into the reception so we don’t overwhelm guests. We get a combination of dancing photos, candid mingling, and group portraits. If you don’t have a send-off planned, we stay at least until we feel like we’ve told a solid story of the reception and a good representation of the guests in our photos. We’ll check in with you two toward the end of the night and see how you feel about coverage.
If during your planning process you have any questions at all for us, please feel free to reach out! We’re more than happy to provide recommendations, referrals, or come up with solutions to any sticking points you’re having! Please consider us consultants!
