Your ‘Perfect Day’ Timeline Guide

Your wedding day shouldn’t feel rushed—here’s how to make every moment feel seamless, so you get to enjoy every little bit!

We’ve helped orchestrate hundreds of stunning celebrations and this is an example of a typical wedding day timeline that both allows you time to enjoy, and also ensures you get all the essential moments captured!

Getting Ready

GROOM — We recommend 45mins to 1hr for a groom getting ready.

BRIDE — We recommend 1.5 hours for a bride

(This means we generally start 2.5 hours + travel time before your ceremony time)

Ceremony

We always arrive 30 minutes before your ceremony begins. This allows plenty of time to find a car park, set up our equipment, photograph ceremony detail and capture guests arriving.

Congratulations

15 minutes after you have walked back up the aisle after your ceremony for your guests to congratulate you. Optional if you are short on time for your photos, often couples request the congratulations to happen at the reception. Bonus — it’s great way to get the party started!

Family Photographs

Generally 15 minutes is plenty unless you have a massive family list of more than 25 combinations or you want to go uber luxe and all Vanity Fair with your family portaits.

Wedding Squad Photos

15 minutes is enough for a standard wedding squad photographs. Once again, it depends how posed you want them and how many locations you’d like them to join you at. If you are heading to multiple locations, we generally recommend you save at least one location for just you and your partner to have some privacy for your photos.

Couple Photographs

If travelling around to different locations, we recommend 30-45mins per location so that you get to relax and enjoy each location - nothing worse than looking flustered and rushed in your romantic shots! If you are staying in the one location 30-45 mins in total is plenty, but we won’t say not to taking more photos of you both! If you have sunset photos planned, you can scale that back to 20 minutes.

When timing different photoshoot locations, allow extra time for getting to and from each location in case of busy traffic or challenging parking for your crew.

Sunset Photos

The absolute best and ideal time for romantic photographs is golden hour/sunset. If you are getting married in the summer time, you could put aside 2 slots for couple photos - 30 mins after your ceremony and another 20-30 mins at sunset (during the serving of mains). This is such a beautiful time of night to step out, take a breather, soak in the beautiful surroundings and steal a moment for you and your brand new husband or wifey!

Reception

Reception detail photographs will be taken 25mins before guests enter into the reception venue or at the same time as ceremony detail photographs. It’s worth scheduling your reception formalities to align with your chosen photography coverage. e.g If we are only coverage an hour of your reception, be sure to include any moments you’d like photographed within that first hour.

End Timing

When it comes to the question of ‘how late should your photographer stay?’, this is totally up to you guys and your priorities. We normally stick around until formalities are complete. This is generally 1-2 hours into reception. The remaining coverage is totally optional and depends if you are big into the party photos, or have a grand exit planned :)

We hope you find this helpful! Obviously every celebration is unique and we love working closely with our couples to tailor a timeline that works perfectly for their day and their priorities.