Wedding photo ideas that are not the same twelve poses

Your photographer has a shot list. It is a good shot list, refined over hundreds of weddings, and it will produce an album that looks like a wedding album. That is what you are paying for and you should let them do it.

But the pictures couples actually put on the wall are rarely from the shot list. They are the accidents and the ideas nobody had done before. Here are some worth planning for.

The ones worth asking your photographer for

• The getting-ready room after everyone has left it. Dresses, coffee cups, the debris of the morning
• Your parents watching you, not you. Photographers point the camera at the couple during the ceremony; the faces in the front row are often the better picture
• The kitchen. Caterers working is a genuinely beautiful thing and almost nobody photographs it
• The venue completely empty, ten minutes before doors open
• The last song, shot from behind the band looking out

The ones your guests take better than anyone

Guests have access your photographer does not: the table conversations, the smoking area, the bit where your uncle teaches a child to do the worm. A shared album link on the tables gets you hundreds of these for nothing.

The trick is making the link trivially easy to use. A QR code on each table works; an instruction to email a Dropbox address does not.

The ones that do not exist yet

There is a category of wedding photo nobody can take, because it did not happen: the two of you getting married on the moon, underwater, in 1926, in the middle of a dinosaur stampede.

These are now easy to make, and they are much funnier when a guest thought of the idea rather than you. A room full of people trying to out-do each other on the most absurd scene produces things you would never have come up with, and the winner tends to end up framed precisely because it is ridiculous.

Make one with your own photo, free, in about fifteen seconds. Try it free →

One thing to decide in advance

Whether you want an unplugged ceremony. A row of phones held up ruins the photographs your professional is taking, and once one person does it the rest follow. If you want it unplugged, say so clearly — on the invitation, on a sign, and out loud before you start. Half-asking does not work.

Then let them take everything they want at the reception, where more cameras genuinely means more good pictures.