10 Essential Wedding Day Timing Tips to Ensure Your Day is Stress Free!

Sean has writ­ten a fan­tas­tic arti­cle about wed­ding day tim­ings and I’m ever so pleased I can share extracts of it with you here today.

It’s great to be able to share Sean’s advice from his expe­ri­ence of over 200 wed­dings, and I hope you find these wed­ding day tim­ing tips really use­ful. My favorite part? Sean’s sam­ple tim­ings include this gem: “12.21 go to the loo. It might be the last chance you get for a while!”

10 Essen­tial Wed­ding Day Tim­ing Tips

This is an extract from Sean’s arti­cle — to see the full piece please click wed­ding day tim­ing tips

After pho­tograph­ing over 200 wed­dings, I have put together some help and tips on plan­ning your wed­ding day cov­er­ing all the key ele­ments. Don’t let all the info in the arti­cle worry you. It’s just a guide to help you have a bit of extra time on your spe­cial day. One thing to bear in mind is that every­thing takes longer than you expect on your wed­ding day!

1. What­ever time you think it might take to get into your dress, dou­ble it! Corseted dresses often need to be tight­ened twice and no one can ever fig­ure out what to do with the spare ribbon.
2. Be ready 20– 30 min­utes before you need to leave. This will give you time with the fam­ily and friends, a chance to make any adjust­ments of your dress or make up and to get some fan­tas­tic images. If you are not rushed at this stage, you may well be much calmer get­ting to the ceremony.
3. I have seen fathers of the bride dri­ving 50 mile round trips because they assumed that there was a shirt in the suit bag for them! Check you have cuf­flinks, ties and shoes as well as suits.
4. Cer­e­monies can last from 6 min­utes to 90+! But one thing that is com­mon is that they rarely start on time! See Sean’s aver­age tim­ings for dif­fer­ent kinds of cer­e­monies on his wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phy blog post.
5. After a wed­ding, every­one wants to con­grat­u­late you! Lots of hugs, kisses, etc. this is a fan­tas­tic part of your day. Think about fac­tor­ing in a bit of time if this happens.
6. After the cer­e­mony is a lovely time to min­gle with fam­ily and guests and enjoy the after­noon. If I were to say that there should be one part of the day to allo­cate time to it would be this. I would rec­om­mend at least 2 hours.
7. Venues also nor­mally call about 15 min­utes before the wed­ding break­fast is sched­uled to start. This can mean loos­ing 20 – 30 min­utes from the time you have allocated.
8. Speeches are nor­mally bet­ter after the wed­ding break­fast… an audi­ence that is well fed and watered is a much, much more respon­sive one. I often ask a groom or best man how long their speeches are. The most com­mon answer is ‘not long, only a few min­utes’. This nor­mally stretches to 15 or 20 min­utes with­out real­is­ing it.
9. Don’t have your first dance too early in sum­mer. Time your first dance when it’s start­ing to get dark so guests stay in and hope­fully join in the dancing.
10. Read detailed sam­ple tim­ings as well as more wed­ding day tim­ing tips at http://www.energyphotographic.co.uk/wedding-day-timing-tips/

What do you think of these tips for plan­ning your wed­ding day tim­ings, and do you have any more to add? Whether you’re a bride or groom to be, or have had your wed­ding and are shar­ing your own “been there, done that” kind of tips, I’d love to hear from you!

Claire x

Thanks to Sean Gan­non, Energy Pho­to­graphic www.energyphotographic.co.uk