Your wedding day will be filled with emotions: happiness, nervousness, excitement, bittersweet joy and so many more. These emotions, and the people close enough to you to feel them, are the parts of a wedding day that I personally am the most drawn to capture. But creating authentic, emotional wedding photography requires a few key steps. Let me break down exactly what I do to help create moments just like these pictured below for you and your fiance.
It starts when we build your timeline
We can’t fake emotions. And we can’t rush them either. When I come on board as your wedding photographer, I help you build your wedding day timeline to ensure we have plenty of time for moments to let these emotions flow. That might mean building in a few extra minutes to sit in the quiet and read a letter from your future spouse. Or adding in a first look with your fiance or your parent. When it comes to creating emotional wedding photography on your day, it’s key to add in the time.
Creating add-on experiences for you and your people
It’s not just about creating time for you during your wedding, but also creating moments that you’ll enjoy. A huge part of emotional wedding photos is actually creating the situation to let you feel the feels. So that can be something like doing a reveal in your dress for your wedding party, having cigars on hand for the groomsmen or bringing a photo album from your grandma’s wedding to look through with her before you walk down the aisle. The important thing when planning these experiences into your timeline is to consider what will be meaningful to your people. If we’re aiming for authentic, emotional wedding photography, we need people to really feel their feelings, not force something that will feel forced.
The real key to emotional wedding photography? Being present
Otherwise known as “put your damn phones down, people.” These photos are beautiful because the people in them lived in the moment. To live in that little pocket of time with you and forget about social media or their cell phone. By having your whole crew put down their phones in these little moments, you get to see their faces and joy. There will be so much time for selfies later and I promise I’m getting the good photos anyways. I can’t say this enough, but the real key to emotional wedding photography is everyone involved being present.
Hire a photographer who follows these guidelines (and encourages you to do the same!) and you’ll be sure to get gorgeous, emotional wedding photos on your day.
