One of the questions every wedding photographer gets sooner or later is, “When will our photographs be ready?”

And honestly, I completely understand it.

You've spent months, sometimes years, planning your wedding. The day itself seems to disappear in about five minutes, I've seen a few preview photographs on social media and suddenly you want to see everything else. I would be exactly the same. Once you've had that little glimpse of your wedding photographs, waiting for the rest probably feels even longer.

But something I've realised over the years is that most couples understandably have absolutely no idea what happens at my end once their wedding is over.

From your side, I've photographed your wedding, I've gone to the office and now I'm editing it. It sounds pretty straightforward.

Unfortunately, it isn't quite like that.

Your wedding doesn't finish when I put the cameras away

Photographing the actual wedding is only one part of the job

One of the decisions couples make fairly early when planning a wedding is where they're actually going to get married. For some, there isn't really a decision at all. They've always imagined walking down the aisle of a church. For others, having the ceremony and reception at the same hotel or wedding venue makes far more sense.

Having photographed weddings across North Yorkshire, Teesside and the North East for many years, I've covered plenty of both, and although the end result is exactly the same — two people getting married — the way the wedding day unfolds can feel surprisingly different.

Wedding group photographs can either be one of the quickest parts of a wedding day or one of the longest. I know that from experience because my personal record for getting through them is somewhere around ten minutes, while at the other end of the scale I've had group photographs take almost three hours.

That's quite a difference, and it wasn't because I suddenly forgot how to use a camera on the three-hour one. 😂

A huge amount comes down to what happens before the wedding, how organised we are on the day and, perhaps most importantly, whether everybody works together when it's time to take the photographs. That's exactly why I've developed my own way of handling wedding group photographs over the years.

When couples first start looking at wedding photography packages, one of the first decisions they have to make is how long they actually want their photographer there. Three hours might cover the ceremony and a few photographs afterwards. Five hours sounds like plenty. Then there’s eight hours, ten hours or full-day wedding photography, and suddenly you’re wondering whether you really need somebody wandering around with a camera for quite that long.

It’s a perfectly reasonable question, particularly when you’re trying to keep control of a wedding budget. But after photographing weddings for almost two decades, I think there’s another question worth asking at the same time: which parts of your wedding story are you happy not to have photographs of?