This is a case of, you don’t know what you don’t know.
The intention is to arm you with a few extra bits of information that will help when making a decision on when/where to get married. The main purpose for this is that with the glut of wedding blogs and Pinterest inspiration pages on show, it’s important that your suppliers weigh in with their expertise to make sure that you get the end product that you want.
#1. Time of Year
This sounds super obvious I know, but take note. The time of year you choose to get married will affect your photographs. In spring the light is much cooler and often looks more blue, in summer, shadows are much harsher due to direct sunlight and guests often wear sunglasses.
In autumn, the leaves are reds and oranges and in winter, the sun sets at 4 pm. Factor in how these things will effect your vision for the day. Remember to visit your venue at the time of year when you plan to get married.
In summer, trees are full and look incredibly grand with their verdant green leaves. That same tree in winter could look pretty sad with it’s branches bare.
Don’t get sold on brochures and other photographers ‘ real weddings’, keep your head in the game and be as sure as you can be. I say this because of the vineyards I’ve photographed weddings at. When they are in full bloom they look amazing, when they are harvested, the vines look appalling. Don’t get caught out by the changes of the seasons and the changes in the landscape.
This also leads nicely onto what we do when it’s raining on your wedding day, the British summer is notorious for being unpredictable.
Bonus Fun:
You can use this very handy tool to see exactly where the sun will be on any day of the year. You can even see the arc that the sun will take so you know where it will be at particular points during your wedding day, how cool is that!?
In this example, you can see that if you want to catch the sunrise over the great pyramids, you’ll need to be up at 5.07 AM. Why the pyramids? I’m listening to alot of obscure podcasts at the minute, i’ll tell you when we meet. Until then, plug in your wedding date, find the venue and you can see where the sun will be at any point during the day
https://www.suncalc.org/#/29.9792,31.1341,16/2019.05.08/13:44/1/3
#2. Mixed Lighting – Warm and Cold
A cake next to a window. The light inside the room is your everyday tungsten 60w lightbulb, the light outside is of your course your everyday sun, does that have a wattage just for lols? What are we looking at – the daylight is blue and the light inside the room is yellow. When you mix the two, this is the result. Is it a major issue? Not really, but worthy of note, knowledge is power right. More on this below…
#3. Coloured Light Bulbs
Some venues are particularly bad at lighting their spaces. You can take the most amazing barn and fill it with coloured light bulbs to make it look fancy, but then if you stand underneath those bulbs when you get married, all of a sudden your skin is purple.
If it was a single factor, it can be adjusted in Photoshop. The problem comes when the background or surrounding areas are lit with different lighting sources, either daylight, or regular yellow bulbs. When you shift the colours to correct one, the colours of the others are thrown out and look a bit weird. If you can choose, stick to white lights, it looks much better in the pictures.
Here’s a barn wedding, it’s lit by daylight in the background, but the couple are stood underneath a purple light…for some reason…
If you use Photoshop to correct the purple and create ‘technically’ accurate skin tones, then it throws the background light, which is yellow daylight, into green weirdness.
So you have to correct that manually…
Or make it black and white…
This is more of a consideration for me than it is you, but venues don’t often listen to me, they think i’m spoiling their fun. If you mention that you’d like the colour lights turned off, then we all win :)
#4. DJ Lights
That awkward moment where you ask the DJ if they can turn their mega expensive laser setup off…
Sorry guys, but they cast really weird shapes onto faces and bodies. Especially wedding dresses. It’s a pure white canvas and everything stands out on it.
Red dots may seem like a cool idea if your theme is polka-dots, but in reality, they just look like spots all over your face. N.B – when the party kicks off, go crazy for lasers. Putt all the lights on you want. This is only really relevant if you want soft, emotional first dance pictures.
After that, the colours and shapes can be quite cool. This point only came to me when I remembered a wedding from many years ago where the uncle was doing the DJ’ing. He has an amazing rig, loads of lights, all the gadgets.
Only problem was, he turned them all on at once. What was a lovely slow dance full of tears ended up needing a lot of editing to get rid of the massive hearts, stars and red dots on the couples faces. First dance, stick with white spotlights, after that, go nuts.
Extra reading
I hope you found this article useful, I’m sure you’ve got loads of questions to ask, which is good! I’ve written extensively on the topic of wedding photography to help clients make an informed choice, check out my resources for clients page to find out more.