15 January 2019

How To Rock Your Wedding Day Couples Shoot

There can be a lot of time pressures on a wedding day and finding time to take couple shots can sometimes be a challenge. Here are some tips to make sure that you make the most of your time and rock your shoot.

Light

The time of day you choose for your couple portraits can have a big impact on the look you get. My favourite time of day for shooting couple portraits is around sun set. This is the point of the day that photographers refer to as golden hour, providing there is a fairly cloud free sky. At this point in the day the light is lovely and soft and you get a real dreamy feel to your images. My advice to my couples, particularly those who are getting married in the summer months, is to postpone couple portraits until later in the day, or consider splitting the couple portraits in to two small chunks of time. One after the ceremony and one around sunset. The great thing about this is that it won’t keep you away from your guests for long at all and you’ll be able to make the most of the lovely light later on.

Embrace The Weather

One of the joys of living in this country is that the weather is pretty indecisive and doesn’t always behave in a way that you’d expect for the season. Wet weather can often make couple portraits tricky but honestly you will never regret taking the time to go out and get some photos. Your wedding day will be over so quickly but the photos are forever. You probably wont wear your wedding dress again, so would be a shame not to make the most of whatever weather you’re given. Go on, be brave.

Relax

Being photographed is pretty nerve wracking. You want to look your best on your wedding day and chances are you haven’t been professionally photographed since the days of fluffy white rugs and fake bookshelf backdrops. It doesn’t matter how many selfies you’ve taken in the bathroom mirror, you’ll still feel a bit nervy. Hopefully it’ll ease your mind to know that everyone feels these things. It’s completely normal. What I would suggest is that you put your trust in the person that you hired to photograph your day. You love their work for a reason and they will know how to guide you to get the very best from you. For me, its all about connection and i’ll do all I can to take the focus off the camera and on to the two of you. I want you to look and feel like yourselves and so I don’t use awkward, forced posing. I often find that if the couples shoot is delayed until later in the day, my couples have had chance to let their nerves settle. All the public speaking will be over and they may have had a glass or 2 of something bubbly. These two things certainly contribute to a more relaxed feeling and much better photos.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

So you’ve found a venue and fallen in love. Its exactly the sort of space that you’ve been dreaming about but there’s one small problem…there’s no cool outside space for photos. Well, the simple answer to that is that you could consider using a different location for your couples shoot. This is one of my favourite things to do. It doesn’t involve driving for miles, but it gives you time out to be together in private, gives much more variety in the types of images that you’ll get and adds a sense of adventure to your day. A great example of this is my lovely couple Sam and Joe. They decided that they wanted to hold their reception in a village hall which had a great indoor space but didn’t have anything exciting outside for their portraits, so after dinner we hoped in the car and drive about 10 minutes to the beach and spent a super lovely time getting some really creative portraits. We arrived back at the reception full of sea air and rosy cheeks.

NIGHT TIME

If you’ve decided to get married in the winter and you’re feeling like this blog post might not necessarily be for you, have no fear and listen up! Shooting night portraits is one of my favourite things to do. It requires a lot more creativity and a few well placed lights but the results are pretty cool. I have done many sparkler shots and these always go down well but there are other interesting ways to use artificial light after its gone dark.

BE PRESENT

Your wedding day will pass so quickly and you may find that you don’t get to spend a great day of time with each other because your guests will want to fuss over you. Your couple portraits is the one point of the day where you will have uninterrupted time so it’s a great time to take stock of whats happening and how brilliant it all is. If you are fully focussed on each other and thinking about how utterly in love you are with this human, that will come across in your images.