Happy Monday y’all! We hope your weekend was nothing short of amazing. We just finished off a really crazy, challenging season for us, so we’ve been soaking up some time together and with family over the past few days. It’s been so needed, but now we are totally ready to jump back into work and are SO pumped to be back chatting with y’all today!
On this snowy March Monday (#Illinois, right?!), we’re back with part two of three in our “What We Wish Brides Knew” series, and we’re so excited to chat about the last few things on that list today! In case you missed the first two posts of this series, you can catch the first one right here and the second one right here. The first post focused on before your wedding day, and like the second post, today will be focused things that involve the actual wedding day. First, here’s the back story on this series… then, we’ll jump RIGHT into the content for today’s post!
We’ve had a lot of incredible bridal consults over the past few weeks (engagement season, holla!), and at each one, we’ve been asked the SAME question. It’s super challenging to answer, but it is definitely important:
“What is ONE thing you wish your brides new before their wedding day?”
Since it’s extremely hard to narrow down this answer down to just one thing (and, in reality, there are a lot of things we wish our brides knew about while planning their wedding!), we wanted to share them ALL with you brides! Truthfully, most of the things we wish our brides knew all small, but they are enormous game changes for a wedding day. One of our all time favorite photographers, Katelyn James, always talks about micro changes that have a macro impact, and that is totally the case for the things in this post.
So, here is the third and final installment of What We Wish Our Brides Knew! Are you ready?!
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Table of Contents
1. Help Us Style Your Details!
By now, you already know all about the importance of scheduling enough time for your photographers to capture the details on your wedding day. But, what you might not know is that you can play a role in helping your photographer capture some gorgeous images of your wedding day details that are cohesive with your wedding day style and theme. One of the best ways to do this is by purchasing a Mrs. Box in one of your wedding colors! These gorgeous little ring boxes provide the perfect pop of color, they photograph beautifully, and let’s face it… they are just so darn pretty! We wish more brides knew about Mrs. Boxes and purchased one for their wedding day… because really, who doesn’t want detail images that fit the theme of the entire wedding day?!
2. Invest in a beautiful hanger
This little tip one goes along with #1 above! Trust us… a gorgeous wooden hanger photographs so much more beautifully than the plastic hanger your dress comes on! Many shops even offer the ability to have your new last name written out in the wire of the hanger. When we got married, I purchased a hanger for my wedding dress on Etsy, and I even got to select the ribbon and wood colors. This tiny detail makes a world of a difference in your dress photos, and we wish more brides knew to invest a little bit of money into one of these!
3. Be smart about your family portrait list
Ohh, friends. If there’s one thing we hear from our sweet couples’ families on wedding days, it’s how surprised they are that family photos were such a quick and stress-free experience with us! While this has to do with the amazing families we work with and the way Luke and I have discovered to divide the responsibilities during this time, the biggest reason family portraits time goes so well is because we limit the amount of portrait combinations to 10 (and never go over 15)! Limiting our couples to 10 combinations of extended family photos makes a world of a difference. We even recommend that our couples narrow this down to as few combinations as possible; this means they can enjoy their cocktail hour or sneak away for some beautiful married photos instead of working through a list of thirty-seven family photos they never are even going to frame 😉
By the time extended family portrait time rolls around, we’ve already taken care of all immediate family portraits if our couples chose a first look, so during extended family portraits, all that we have left to capture are photos with grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins. Don’t worry if you have a large family… you can still make this happen!
For example, at our wedding, my extended family is small, but Luke’s side is GIANT. So, we tried to get as many people in each photo as possible, and our extended family photos looked a little something like this! (#8 below had close to 50 people in it, so we saved a ton of time by doing grabbing one big, crazy fun shot with everybody. It’s one of our favorite photos from the whole day!)
1. Bride, groom, bride’s father’s family
2. Bride, groom, bride’s paternal grandparents
3. Bride, groom, bride’s mother’s family
4. Bride, groom, bride’s maternal grandparents
5. Bride, groom, bride’s mother’s family
6. Bride, groom, groom’s mother’s family
7. Bride, groom, groom’s maternal grandparents
8. Bride, groom, groom’s father’s family
9. Bride, groom, groom’s paternal grandparents
Y’all, family portraits do NOT have to be stressful… it’s all about being intentional in your choices, and we wish more brides knew that!
4. Invest in Your Prints
As we’ve shared before, we’re huge believers in investing in a professional wedding album! However, we’re also big believers in purchasing high-quality prints. We can’t tell you what a difference it makes to order prints from your photographer’s gallery rather than a drugstore or another company online. In fact, I even tested this recently.
After our engagement session and our wedding, I purchased a TON of prints directly through our gallery from our amazing photographer. However, I had a coupon for a ton of free prints from a company online, so I decided to order some wedding and engagement prints from this company, too. You guys… the photos look a million times different. It is absolutely crazy! The texture of the prints is way different, the colors are muted and faded, and I have no idea how people are satisfied with these photos when something so much greater is available. 🙂
While I still kept these photos, they look nowhere near as gorgeous as the ones from our gallery. We wish more brides knew how important it is to invest in high quality prints, whether they’re printing engagement photos to display at a bridal shower or their wedding OR printing their wedding photos.
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So, there you have it… the last post FULL of things we wish our brides knew! We’re so hopeful that these tips provide some perspective and insight as you plan your best day ever! Our desire is for your wedding day to be smooth, relaxed and simple, and we want to help you make sure you can describe your wedding day with those words when it is all said and done. We say all the time that our goal is for photography to be the BEST and EASIEST part of your wedding day, and if we can help the other aspects of your big day to fall into place, we’re all about that! The fact is, if your wedding day runs smoothly and beautifully, your photography will too.
What do you wish YOU had known while planning your wedding? We want to hear about it in the comments below! You never know if your perspective could help another bride reading, so don’t be afraid to share! Xo! ????
