How to plan your wedding timeline!
Without a doubt, one of the most frequently asked questions we receive from our couples is “how should we plan the timing of our wedding day?”, and to be honest we can’t blame them! Basically, planning your wedding is the equivalent of someone with no mechanical background servicing their own car - odds are you’re not an event planner, so it’s fair enough if you’re not exactly sure how you should structure the day or how these things are supposed to run!
Before we get into the juicy stuff, as always, please note that what we recommend in this blog post is exactly that - our recommendations. There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to wedding planning - the main thing is that you consider what is important to you and your partner, and what you want for your day - if nothing else, we hope that these points give you a starting point for your planning process!
Planning your timeline doesn’t have to be the scary thing that it can seem, but just in case, we’ve made a very barebones example timeline of how you might plan out your day (please note it’s very much written selfishly from the perspective of a photographer). It might give you a basic template to expand on for your own wedding. If you’d like to check that out:
DOWNLOAD OUR FREE SAMPLE TIMELINE!
Getting Ready!
The day is finally here - you’ve hopefully managed a few good hours of sleep and are excited for the awesome day ahead. You’re nervous, but not stressed! That’s because you’ve planned the day ahead and everyone involved knows where they need to be and when!
The morning/early afternoon portion of the day where in a typical wedding day, you and your partner will spend time getting ready - whether this is together or separated - and having this part of the day planned out well can save a lot of stress. For starters, if there is hair and makeup involved, we would always recommend chatting with your hair stylist and makeup artist(s) to find out how much time they will need for each person on the morning of the wedding. A rough guess for this might be 1 hour for makeup and 30 minutes for hair, per person. So, if you have 4 in your wedding party that are having their makeup done, be aware that this could take a fairly lengthy amount of time - we recommend having a bottle of champagne or two put aside for the morning, it helps pass the time and settle the nerves!
Generally we try to avoid snapping photos of you and/or your partner during the hair/makeup stages of the day, because to be completely honest we’re not sure that anyone wants photos with half a face of makeup or half a head of hair. BUT, if you are keen on it, you can always have your hair stylist/makeup artist do some final touch-ups once your photographer arrives (it’s also important to make sure that the hair/makeup won’t have left by the time the photographer arrives, if you want these kind of photos).
The morning of a wedding is one of our favourite parts of the day, and can often produce some of the most emotional and memorable photos!
If you’re wanting some ideas for your getting ready photos, we’ll have another blog post specifically about this coming soon, you can sign up to our mailing list here:
Ceremony
The business end of things, the average ceremony usually lasts 20-30 minutes - enjoy it, because this is one part of the day you wish you could relive. Depending on your celebrant and how involved you want it to be, this may be shorter or longer. After the serious stuff is done, we like to recommend that you allow about 15 minutes for your friends and family to congratulate you, give you a hug and enjoy the warm fuzzies that come with being just married.
We then recommend getting straight into your family/group photos, in our opinion the best way to go is to get this done ASAP before your guests start socialising with a beverage in hand - as a little bonus tip, we’d recommend writing a list of all of the combinations of friends/family you would like group photos with. Send this to your photographer, so that they can have it on their phone and hand it off to that loud friend (there’s always one) to hunt everyone down. This makes things super quick and easy, and saves having to try and remember everyone in the moment - you’ll thank us for it. Your family/group photos will take around 20-30 minutes, depending on how many combinations of groups you have.
Bridal Party & Bridal Portraits
Now we’ve got all of the serious stuff out of the way, grab a bottle (or three) of champagne, it’s time for some pics with your new husband/wife! On most wedding days, we usually get into this just after the family/group pics - we recommend 45-60 minutes in an ideal world! The actual bridal party element of this might only be 15-20 minutes depending on location(s) and how wild you wanna get (feel free to do some f1-style champagne spray).
This means you’ll have half an hour or so for photos with your new spouse! You might think that this feels like a long time, but it’s important to allow that sort of timeframe because:
You give yourselves plenty of time to warm up to being in front of the camera. It can be hard having your photo taken, the more time you give yourselves to get used to that weird (and a little bit awkward) feeling, the better!
This is some of the only time you’ll spend “alone” (it’s in quotation marks because you’ll still have the photographer there lol) until you hit the hay later on in the night - try and enjoy it. Talk about the day, catch up with each other! You won’t get much more of a chance in the coming hours!
Lastly, more is always better than less - you’ve invested a significant amount in your photographer and your outfits, it would be a waste to rush things and not get absolutely bangin’ pics!!
Honestly, the best way to prepare for having your wedding photos taken is just to have the chat with your photographer about what your expectations should be, i.e. how do they like to work? Do they get really involved with direct posing? Do they like a more candid, fun style? If you’re super worried about it, you could always test things out with an engagement shoot beforehand as well :)
Reception
Just a quick note before we get to the reception - it’s fairly common for the bridal party to take 15-20 minutes after these bridal portraits, before the reception starts to have a quick sit-down for some snacks and drinks - this can be cool if you need a second to catch your breath!
If you’re lucky, your venue will provide you with a generic run sheet for the reception portion of the day but for those who don’t have the luxury then it can be really tricky to co-ordinate, especially as your vendors will all likely need to know what the plan is.
The easiest way to plan out the timing of your reception is to start back at the ceremony and use the info above to space things out. To summarise, we would want to allow at least:
30 minutes for the ceremony
15 minutes with family and friends after the ceremony
30 minutes for family/group photos
60 minutes for bridal party/bridal portraits
So, for a 3pm ceremony you may pencil in a 5.30pm start for your reception!
Once you’ve figured out what time guests should be seated for the reception, it’s relatively easy to then pencil in dinner, speeches, dessert, first dance(s) (if you want ‘em) and of course the d-floor.
That’s about it! Planning your timeline doesn’t have to be the scary thing that it can seem, but just in case, we’ve made a very barebones example timeline of how you might plan out your day (please note it’s very much written selfishly from the perspective of a photographer). It might give you a basic template to expand on for your own wedding. If you’d like to check that out, click here!
