Wedding Day Portraits

PORTRAITS. Ok, so often times in my blogs or my social media posts, you’ll see me refer to an image as a portrait. And if we’ve worked together you’ve heard me talk about the portrait section of the day especially while we’re working on the timeline for the wedding day. The portrait section of the day is the time we set aside for the creative images of the newlyweds and also the family pictures and bridal party pictures if you have a bridal party. All of these together make up the portrait section(s) of the day.

There are a few different ways to arrange the portrait section for the day. And because there are different sections within the portraits, you don’t necessarily need to do them all together. Now I will say it’s usually most efficient to group them all together so that we can finish them and you can move on to the other parts of the day knowing your portraits are done. But if that doesn’t work for your wedding day there is some flexibility.  

So how much time do we need for portraits?

Let's talk about recommended time. Bridal party and family portraits can usually be done in about 30 minutes. For the most part, family portraits are done in one location. We pick one spot and put each combination you requested in that spot, similar to the images below. If you have an extensive list of family groups we may need to allot more time.

Bridal Party

Now with bridal party pictures, we usually start with an approach similar to family portraits (One spot, one background) and if we have enough time we can get a few more combinations and perhaps even get a little more creative. Again, family and bridal party together would account for about 30 minutes depending on the sizes of these groups and how many combinations you'd like.

For the Newlyweds

For the newlyweds, I typically approach the wedding day portraits like a session. Sessions are usually about an hour which allow us enough time to get some variety, and some creativity but still not rush so that we can get those romantic creative portraits while taking our time to make sure you look your best. If you’ve done an engagement session with me, the wedding day portraits will feel very familiar.

All portraits combined should take about an 90 minutes of time on your wedding day. Earlier I mentioned that we have some flexibility with splitting up the portraits. Most couples choose to do all the portraits in one block of time which I highly recommend since gathering groups on a wedding day is one of the most challenging tasks we must do. So we should do our best to only do it once. 😉 However in certain circumstances you may want to separate these sections of portrait time. For example, you may choose to do all portraits before your ceremony except for family, which would be done right after the ceremony during cocktail hour. This makes sense if certain family members won’t be with the group before the ceremony. Or you may choose to split the bride and groom portraits if you want to take advantage of multiple locations like a garden or park nearby and then the wedding reception venue. In any event, the best way to approach this is to talk to your photographer and work out a detailed timeline for everyone to follow.