How to actually enjoy your wedding day

You've spent months planning your wedding. The venue, the people, the details, all of it arranged for one day that should, more than any other, feel entirely like yours.

The unusual thing about wedding photography is that it can either help that happen or work against it. When it works against it, you spend the day aware of the camera, managing portraits, losing time with guests, feeling like a subject rather than someone getting married. When photography is done right, you forget it is even happening.

Before the day

The most useful piece of advice we give couples is this: plan your own wedding. Not the wedding your family expects, or the one you feel you ought to have, but the day that genuinely suits the two of you.

This sounds obvious but many couples struggle with it. Couples are under pressure from every direction: venue capacities, guest lists, traditions, what other people did and often end up building a schedule that works for everyone but themselves. When you build a day that fits the way you actually want it to go, it almost always has breathing room in it, and it's that breathing room that makes everything else feel calm and enjoyable, which shows in the photography.

It also helps enormously to choose photographers who see their role as fitting around your day rather than shaping it. The less the photography demands dedicated time, and the more naturally it sits within the day you've planned, the better everything tends to feel.

The preparation we do beforehand means you won't need to think about us on the day at all. We'll already know your timeline, the important people, and what you're most looking forward to. That's what lets us stay out of the way.

How we approach the planning beforehand is covered on our pricing page.

The morning

For most couples, the morning of the wedding is the most hectic part of the day but can often one of the loveliest.

Hair and makeup run slightly long, as they always do. Family members arrive earlier or later than expected. Everything seems to happen at once. The instinct is to try to hold it all together, which usually means spending the morning doing things rather than being in it.

Couples who enjoy the morning most have usually prepared well enough that they don't need to be in charge of it. The decisions have been made and the suppliers know the brief. All that's left is to be a guest at their own wedding, which, it turns out, is exactly the right mindset to be in.

Mornings are full of the small things that turn out to matter: someone's hands shaking slightly, a parent seeing them ready for the first time, the last five minutes of quiet before everything starts. We capture those moments quietly without interrupting them.

The ceremony

The ceremony passes faster than almost anything else in the day. Most couples describe it as a blur, not in a bad way, but in the way that a moment you've been building towards for months suddenly arrives and then it's over quickly. You're married.

So the only advice worth giving is this: forget everyone watching and just be in it with your partner. The details of the ceremony itself are rarely what couples remember. What stays is the feeling of it, and that's what the photographs are trying to give back to you.

Something couples rarely think about in advance: the people who love you most, seeing you at the front of a ceremony they've perhaps been looking forward to for as long as you have. A parent trying not to cry. A grandparent watching intently. You won't see any of it at the time, and it'll all be there when you receive your gallery.

After the ceremony

Right after the ceremony, before you're swept into the drinks reception, we usually suggest couples take fifteen or twenty minutes, just the two of them. A short walk somewhere nearby, away from the busy drinks reception.

This is often the first time you'll be alone as newlyweds. Taking this precious time means nobody pulling you into conversations with old friends or distant cousins. Nobody asking whether the tables have been set up correctly. It's just the two of you, in the middle of your wedding day, with a moment to be fully present with each other.

Our couples consistently tell us this is their favourite part of the day. The best photographs happen when you fully immerse yourself in this moment. We'll walk with you, talk about how the ceremony felt, what you're looking forward to in the evening to come. The portraits happen during this time, and they tend to be best in the first ten minutes or so, before anyone starts to feel like they're posing. We stop while things still feel natural and easy.

While one of us is with you on the walk, the other is at the drinks reception documenting the conversations, the toasts, the room filling up. You get to relive a part of the day you weren't physically at.

The reception and evening

By the time you sit down to dinner, something tends to shift.

The formality has passed. The nerves that have been running quietly in the background since the morning start to settle. Couples tell us this is the moment the day stops feeling like an event they're hosting and starts feeling like a celebration they can fully enjoy. This is when the magnitude of what you've done starts to properly land.

Enjoy the food, the drink, the company. Let the speeches move you. Get on the dance floor. Forget the camera is there.

The candid moments are where we'll be watching most closely during this part of the day: the moment someone finally lets themselves cry during a speech after holding it together all day, the group of old friends who are laughing together like old times, the parent who's sat down at last and is quietly absorbing it all. Nobody asked for those photographs. The best thing you can do during the evening is forget we're there and let the photographs take care of themselves.

Have a look through some of the weddings we've photographed to see what a full day looks like.

What stays

When you first open your gallery, you'll relive the day as it happened. The photographs you were expecting: the ceremony, the portraits, the first dance. And then, somewhere in it, you'll find one you weren't expecting. A moment you didn't know was being photographed. Something that stops you and puts you straight back there.

That's the photograph we're always hoping to make: the one that doesn't just record what happened but takes you back into what it felt like to be standing in that room, with those people, on that particular day. The afternoon light through the windows. The atmosphere after the ceremony when everyone had finally let something go. The sense of the wedding being entirely, unmistakably yours.

Some of those photographs from recent weddings we've photographed are below.