Wedding Hint Wednesday: Get Ready Early

Hello!! And welcome to my first of <hopefully> many “Wedding Hint Wednesdays!” This is pretty self-explanatory I suppose, but every Wednesday I’ll be sharing advice for my brides collected from my experience shooting weddings <and also from being a bride way back when>. I’m a big believer in all things stress-free. Weddings are not stressful—we can, however,  MAKE them stressful, but this is completely avoidable. The first hint on my list?

Get Ready EARLY!

When I’m asked to capture a wedding, I send out a suggested photo schedule for the couple, bridal party, and family. Nine times out of ten, they are surprised at how early they need to be ready—well, at least those in the MALE category are surprised. 😉 I always leave it ultimately up to the bride and groom, of course, but here are a few reasons to get ready very much ahead of time on your wedding day:

Reason number ONE:

You get to RELAX. After your hair and makeup has been done, you know the dress still fits perfectly, and you are finished with all of the group photos, you can finally take a step back from the crazy and ENJOY the rest of your wedding day!

Reason number TWO:

You get to FIX the little things that go wrong—and they do. Even the most meticulous of planners will have something go wrong. Maybe the makeup artist gives you blue eye-liner instead of brown. Maybe your hair was just a little less “poofy” when your stylist did the trial run, and you need that corrected. The best man is nowhere to be found. Cousin Betty Bridesmaid forgot to set her alarm last night. Suddenly, the slideshow that you did 18,000 test runs on isn’t working and needs to be re-formatted. And where is that marriage license? <And, yes, I’ve seen each of these happen at weddings>

See, all of those oopsies are MUCH less of a crisis when you’ve allotted “cushion” time, and you have time to recover before the curtain goes up on your big day.

Reason number THREE:

Pictures can take longer than expected. Most of the time, we can get the group shots we need right out of the gate. Other times, we need to spend a little more time on the shots. Maybe one of your groomsmen ALWAYS seems to close his eyes right as the shot is taken, and we need to take some extra shots just to make sure. Perhaps the forecast is sunny, but suddenly it starts raining and we need to switch the photos to an indoor location. Etcetera.

Reason number FOUR:

Maybe you look so ridiculously GORGEOUS that I just can’t stop shooting you two! One thing my brides should know about me: I can get really “into it” when the sun is just right, and you look at your beloved with that twinkle in your eye and let out a little laugh that makes the most perfect, most intimate, most uniquely “you” moment, and then I gush over the photo way more than necessary, spend hours editing it to perfection, agonize over whether or not to make it black and white…no, color…no, black and white…no, color…definitely color!–then slap it on my website homepage for the rest of eternity…Okay, I’m getting off-topic. But you get it: “into it.”

So reason number four is: When you allot more time in your wedding day to de-stress, to take pictures steadily, all-day, capturing the process, the experiences, the emotions of the day…you get photos like these:

With joy, Lizard.

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