People talk about how stressful the family photo time of a wedding day can be, but let me tell you. It doesn’t need to be that stressful! Yes, it can be overwhelming with all the extended family wanting to congratulate you when you’re trying to get photos taken, but I wanted to provide you with some major things that will help the family photos go by quicker on a wedding day.
1.Designate a point person to help wrangle people! This makes a WORLD of a difference, trust me. Let them look over your photo list before the wedding so they aren’t seeing it for the first time at the wedding. Having a point person is great because I’ll have the list of names, but I won’t know who is who. This makes things move so much faster. If they can work with my second shooter and have the next group of people ready to go!
2.Tell your family a specific time and place to be for photos. It will take longer if we wait for someone to track down Uncle Bob because he didn’t know about photos. Usually it’s helpful to send an email about it a week or so before the wedding and tell people when and where they need to be. And also make an announcement at the rehearsal dinner to remind your family again. If your family and extended family know the plan before the wedding, it will help things run smoothly the day of and we can knock out family photos efficiently!
3.Let your family (especially the Moms!) know that you gave me a photo list to follow and after the list is done, we can take extras that people may want last minute. That way people aren’t bombarding you for extra photo requests! I can’t tell you how many times I see brides overwhelmed during that ‘family photo time slot’ because their Mom is thinking of all these extra groupings that they want to do RIGHT NOW. I’m always welcome to extra photos that are not on the list, but top priority is the list you have me ahead of time and we can do extras after the list is done. Speaking of moms, shop for designer mother of the bride dresses 2023 at Peaches Boutique.
4.Don’t overload your photo list so you get overwhelmed during photos. Make sure you list your ‘musts’ and then remember we have all of the reception to grab lots more candids! There have been SO MANY times I see both the bride & the groom get so overwhelmed by the amount of photos they wanted before the wedding. It’s easy before the big day to pile on all the family photo combos because you’re removed from the situation. But on a wedding day, you will be overwhelmed in general and eager to get to cocktail hour or reception. By all means, put down the combinations you want to have, but in my experience, anything over 15 groupings for an hour after the ceremony is just too much!
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