Wedding Timeline Planning Guide

For this wedding photography timeline planning guide I wanted to give you everything you needed to make the most of your wedding day. The first section has the Ideal amount of time all the individual photography events take. This does not include any travel time so if you plan on changing locations between any of those items you would want to schedule in that time as well. Also if you have any parts of your day that might be logistically more complicated like a really hard dress to put on,  loading up a car, or having to travel through traffic, you will want to add more buffer time as well. Its always better to have too much time and have the opportunity to slow down and relax versus feeling rushed. Also if there’s buffer time built in throughout the day it will help absorb if any other part of the day runs late.

One of the biggest variables is how long to take during bride and groom portraits. You will most likely want at least 15 minutes. If you just want a few basic portraits and you do not need to move around much for portrait locations you can easily get a good variety of portraits in 15 minutes. However, if you really value the portrait aspect of the day, or you want to utilize more than one location or different aspects of the venue, you might want to push more towards the 45 minutes or an hour of portrait time. The more time you put into the portrait aspect the more I can utilize the venue and get more creative photos as well. Either way is great. One of the advantages of the first look is it allows you to take more time before the ceremony for portraits as well.

Family portraits only take about 20 minutes if everyone is aware that they need to stick around ahead of time and we do not need to round anyone up. We also take 2 or 3 full bridal party shots which only takes about 10 minutes. However if you want something more stylized or fun for the bridal party we can add 10 minutes to move into the other location and make a more stylized shot as well.

Below you will find timeline elements as well as a sample traditional and first look timeline. At the bottom of the page you also have downloadable timeline templates to fill out your own timeline both in pdf and google drive.