5 Tips for a Seamless Wedding Day Timeline | Utah Wedding Photographers

 

Planning a wedding is a lot of work, especially if you are a detail oriented bride, which most of our brides are! Weddings require a lot of time, energy, and emailing back and forth. To help set you up for success, we’ve put together this blog with our five favorite wedding schedule hacks to help you create a seamless wedding day timeline.

 

1. Before You Schedule Your Wedding Day, Talk to Your Photographer

This is one of the biggest mistakes that brides don’t often think about. To help yourself feel less stressed and to make your day run as smoothly as possible, talk to your photographer and other wedding experts before you schedule your wedding day timeline. The people you hire to support you on your big day have been to multiple weddings and know what works the best. By talking with your photographer before you schedule your events, you can make sure that you get your pictures taken at the best times of day possible, that you have enough time to get your pictures done, and that all of the details that you care about have time to be photographed. We have example timelines that we like to send to our couples when they choose us as their photographer. Together we take those examples and make them fit our couple’s individual wedding!

 

2. Allow time for Traveling and Delays

It’s so easy to forget about travel time, especially if you are getting married in an LDS temple and your reception is at a different location than your wedding. It’s good to have a bit of a buffer for traffic too, especially on weekends. You’ll want to leave a little bit of extra space in your timeline to help with that. Even if you have your ceremony and reception at the same location, delays could happen, and it is much less stressful day of the wedding if you have thought about it beforehand. For example, the flowers might arrive later than anticipated, the officiant could be late, or hair and makeup might take longer than planned. For LDS temple weddings, sometimes it takes longer for you to come out of the temple than you anticipate, especially on days when it is busy. These delays could cut into your time for photos, or time to greet and hangout with your friends and family. It’s better to be prepared and not feel rushed.

 

3. Consider a First-Look or Formals Session

Consider doing a first-look the morning of (but before) your ceremony. Being okay with breaking “tradition” here has a lot of benefits. First off, you get a chance to see each other privately and share a special moment before the ceremony, but also it helps portraits move even more smoothly throughout the day. After doing a first-look we take bridal party portraits and family portraits. This saves a lot of stress caused from trying to gather people after the ceremony when they would rather greet you both and say hello to old friends. This allows your friends and family to fully relax after your ceremony and is a “win-win” all around. If you are a bride getting married in an LDS temple, opting to do a first-look at a formals session before the wedding day allows you to still have an experience of a first-look. When you get married in the temple, you don’t have that chance. It also allows you to have extra pictures in your wedding dress and suit at a location off of temple grounds. You only wear your wedding dress on your wedding day normally; wouldn’t you love an extra day and more pictures in it?!

 

4. Plan on Ending Your Reception 30 Minutes Early?

Say what??? One of the best pieces of advice we received from our wedding photographer years ago was to think about what time we wanted to leave our wedding reception, and to write a time that was 30 minutes earlier as the end time on our announcements. This was a serious game changer! Some people are notoriously late to events, and that includes wedding receptions. If you need to leave at a certain time, listing your reception end time 30 minutes early will give you the buffer space you need to be able to breathe easy and have fun with your awesome exit!

 

5. Go with the Flow

Our last piece of advice would be to just go with the flow. Check out our post here for tips for creating a stress-free wedding! Weddings are huge events with lots of moving parts, and sometimes they can be unpredictable. Your wedding day will be as awesome as you make it!  If you are cool and relaxed, everyone else will be too. Don’t forget that people are working hard to make sure that your wedding day is as special as it can be! Just remember, at the end of the day, what the reason was for all the fuss. You just married your best friend, that’s what matters more than anything else!

 

On your wedding day, have faith in the people that you’ve hired to help you and support you. Hire vendors that you trust and that you get along with. They along with your family and friends are there cheering you on! Now go out there and marry the love of your life and enjoy every special moment of your seamless wedding day! If you missed our post about the top things that a bride might forget on her wedding day, check out our post here!