Wedding Photographer Tips

Tips

May 16

*Image by* *Gail Secker Photography*
Edited with Perpetua Presets and AI Wedding Toolset

Wedding photography is one of the biggest and most visible genres of photography— most wedding photography is shared not just between the photographer and the client, but also with and by vendors, wedding guests and family, and potentially publications if photographers submit images.

There are about a million ways to go about weddings— from editing to marketing to the business side of things— but in this article, we wanted to highlight a few tips for wedding photographers to make your lives a little easier!

Of course, every photographer has their way of doing things, but if you’re just starting to take on wedding clients or looking for inspiration during a lull in activity, check out these tips!

Month Before the Wedding: Timeline

In the month leading up to the wedding date, reach out to your clients to schedule a meeting or email about their wedding day timeline. By at least 30 days out, they should have the start times for their other vendors, like catering, hair and makeup, etc. Work with them to create a photo timeline using the other vendors’ start times, ceremony start time, dinner time from catering, etc.

Discuss if they are doing a first look— with a first look pre-ceremony, it frees up some pre-ceremony time in the day for couples photos, photos of the whole wedding party, and mixed family groupings, if there’s time. Without a first look, any photos involving both marriers will have to happen after the ceremony.

*Image by* *Hansel Ferrón*
Edited with Quest 36 Botanica

Tips:

Set the photo timeline as your phone background or take a photo of it as the first image on your SD card in your camera so you can reference it quickly throughout the day!
Factor in extra time around each photo event in the timeline to account for things running late and downtime for yourself or to capture as many candid moments as you can!

*Image by* *Pauline Wong Photography*
Edited with Perpetua Presets, AI Portrait Toolset, and AI Wedding Toolset

Day or Night Before the Wedding: Gear

I’m sure it seems obvious that you need to pack your gear before the wedding— but if you’re anything like me, you’ll be a ball of anxiety and have to triple-check everything is there, especially for an out-of-town or destination wedding! (Have I called my mother to bring me an extra flash when I thought mine malfunctioned early in my wedding photography career? Yes. Yes I have.)

Pack: In addition to your camera, lenses, and lighting equipment, pack extra of the following:

SD cards (format or check them for old photos so they have all their memory ready to go)
Batteries and battery charger— you can plug in a depleted battery during the reception if need be!
Snacks and water
Medication for yourself— like painkillers or prescriptions
Rain gear
If you have props for detail set ups, pack them! (yes, I have forgotten these for an out-of-town wedding. Yes, I ran to Michaels Crafts to pick up random ribbons. Yes, the bride at that wedding already had plenty of stuff for details— wedding photographers can be irrational sometimes)

*Image by* *Deniz Xenia Funke*
Edited with Quest 36 Botanica, AI Portrait Toolset, and AI Wedding Toolset

My personal favorite things to get me through a wedding day:

Utility cart to carry my gear so it’s not weighing down my back
Back brace
USB rechargeable necklace fan for hot summer weddings

Check: Check the following to make sure your gear is ready to go:

Batteries— make sure they’re charged and fuctional
Flash settings— make sure your flash is set up how you like it
Clean lenses
Check camera strap attachment— if you use a double camera sling or another kind of camera strap or holster, make sure it’s tight and your camera won’t detach randomly!

*Image by* *Mike Meller*
Edited with Quest 36 Botanica, AI Portrait Toolset, and AI Wedding Toolset

*Image by* *Sherri Poirier Photography*
Edited with Perpetua Presets and AI Wedding Toolset

After the Wedding: Workflow

Talking about post-processing workflow might not be the most exciting, but it is SO important!

As soon as you can after the wedding, back up your SD cards! Import photos on your computer and start a cloud backup! DON’T erase or format your SD cards until the wedding gallery has been delivered! These cards are your EXTRA SECURITY in case something goes wrong!
It helps when you’re excited about a wedding to start culling your images right away— it’s the least fun (well, it’s my least favorite) part of editing but it will give you a handle on what you captured throughout the day so you know what you have!
If you do night of or morning after sneak peeks, send those puppies out! Personally, even before I cull, I grab a couple of images I know were amazing from the wedding and edit them. I send them to the couple so they have something to post/change their social status with (instead of some blurry cellphone photo from a guest).

Do a preview/sneak peek gallery with a variety of images from the wedding day— not only do YOU want to post these, you’ll want to tag vendors and get those networking reshares going! Decide if you want to give vendors a vendor gallery or what policy you have with sharing images with vendors. Typically, I send a robust sneak peek/preview gallery to couples within the week after their wedding to give them something to get excited about and share.

After editing the full gallery, make sure your export settings are good to go— use something like JPEGMini if you deliver high res files so the couple can open them and they won’t get totally overwhelmed by your file sizes!
Double check your cloud backups after delivering the gallery— if you are freeing up space and don’t have contract language about keeping images for X amount of time, only delete the images you definitely don’t need. What I do is filter my unedited, unrated (I cull using a rating star system) images and mark them as Rejected (key shortcut for this is ‘X’), then delete Rejected images when I KNOW FOR SURE I don’t need them.

*Image by* *Pięknografia Kinga Woźniak*
Edited with Perpetua Presets

Tip: Give your clients all the options by creating black and white copies of certain images! Create virtual copies in Lightroom and use your favorite black and white preset on selected images!