Getting Great Wedding Shots for Great Wedding Photography Portraits

Coming from a photographer you might expect this piece to be about having a great background to the photo like this one on top of Crystal Mountain, Washington, with Mt. Rainier in the distance. Or how to get people to smile with a witty joke. Instead it is about how to get the bride and groom relaxed enough that their natural smile emerges naturally.

Stressed out is how I would describe a lot of the brides and grooms that I meet at the start of their wedding day. Getting great wedding shots to make a great set of photographs of a stressed out wedding couple is a real challenge. Being tense does not make for wedding glamor. It is mostly impossible if they are stressed out over too many of the details of their wedding day.

It helps to think it through in advance and only spend time making the wedding shots you want.

One solution to reducing the stress level is to get help from a wedding-day coordinator. This can be someone hired for the task or it can be someone recruited from the ranks of friends or family. While the bride and groom may prefer to plan out all the events of the day, the coordinator is given the responsibility of all of the little details that can cause the bride and groom to get stressed out and prevent them from relaxing and enjoying their wedding day. Then they can be photographed looking their best, relaxed and not preoccupied with the goings on around them. They will smile more easily with the anxiety missing and in general the wedding shots will be better for it and the wedding “glamour” will come naturally.

As a photographer I have found the one detail to reliably improve the process of making the posed formal portraits of the wedding party and family members is to insist that the bride and groom prepare a shot list at least a week or two before the wedding. This is simply a detailed list of everyone they want to include in the making of formal posed portraits. Listing the actual names of everyone makes it easier to work with. The shot list really eliminates all of the stress of having to decide on your wedding day who will be in which photos. It helps to think it through in advance and only spend time making the wedding shots you want. It works best when you can get the list down to about 8-12 shots. If you try, think about who would want to have these photos and what they would do with them.

It should look something like this:

1. Bride and Groom
2. Bride & Groom with Bride’s parents (with the bride’s parents names)
3. Bride & Groom with Groom’s parents (wth the groom’s parents names)
4. Bride with Bridesmaids (include their names)
5. Groom with . . . (include the names)
6. Bride and Groom with . . . (you get the picture)
7. The entire wedding party
8. Etc…. but try to keep it from going past #12.

The shot list goes to either the wedding day coordinator or a good friend or relative who already knows the majority of these folks. (It helps if they have a drill sergeant attitude. It’s funny, but in my experience it seems everyone knows just the perfect person to give it to). It functions like this:

When the photographer is making the first photo on the shot list, they are rounding up the people in shot 2. and holding them in the on deck circle. Then when the first shot is done, he says next and they proceed to the location to be photographed in their turn. Then the folks in shot #3 are gathered up to stand by. This continues until the end of the list.

This allows the bride and groom to not have to make any stressful decisions on the day of the wedding. It also helps them to know exactly who to tell to come early if the wedding shots will be taken before the ceremony. That is also a stress reducing factor in itself. Take the portraits before the wedding for a more relaxed wedding day for sure.

After 16 years of being a newspaper staff photographer, Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Daniel Sheehan began photographing weddings in 1997 after a call from a desperate couple unable to find a photographer. After photographing their wedding, he made the transition from covering hard news to weddings, documenting them in the same way as his editorial assignments. 250+ weddings later, photographing weddings (including Conan O’Brien’s wedding) has become his most gratifying work. The Wedding Photojournalists Association named him an International Award Winning Photographer. View his wedding photography and learn more about Daniel at his website: ABeautifulDayPhotography.com