The importance of a wedding day schedule

Why a wedding schedule is so important to your suppliers.

As wedding photographers, we have a range of equipment to carry out various tasks on your big day. Hair stylists, make up artists, celebrants, musicians and venues all work to a schedule to ensure they are ready for their tasks at a given time.

My apologies for stating the obvious here but with large amounts of people at a wedding, some of the major things like food preparation needs to be planned down to the minute so it’s vital that we all know what the schedule is.

Things do run off track on a wedding day and with so much experience under our belts this isn’t an issue. The most important part is that in the weeks leading up to it, all of your suppliers know what the plans are and we will do our best to stick to them.

If you’re planning a low key wedding or a jam-packed event, suppliers will still need times to work to even though we come across variations on the day.

During a wedding day, we are working behind the scenes talking with make up artists, hair stylists, florists, the venue, MC and musicians to make sure we’re all in the know about what’s next on the schedule to make sure we’re all ready.

To give you a quick run through of what can go wrong, this happened to me recently. It was 7.10pm and I knew that the next thing on the schedule was the Father-Daughter dance at 7.30pm. I used the 20 minutes I had free to set up my macro lens and a remote flash to photograph a close up of the wedding rings placed in the bouquet. Just as I was starting to snap a few photos, the MC got on the mic at 7.15pm and asked the father and daughter to come up and do their dance. The stress ran through my body.. I had the wrong lens on, no flash and I was at the back of the room. I had to toss a $1200 lens in my bag, quickly put on a $2500 lens, whip on a flash and shove my way through guests to get to the front of the room in time to shoot. Not ideal for anyone. I’m stressed, I’ve had to be rude to guests, I had a minute to gather myself to be calm enough to photograph the rest of the dance in 2 or 3 minutes.

What it all boils down to is what I hope is admirable. As your suppliers, we want to give you the best day and the way to do that is to keep all of us across the schedule.

We will always create a schedule for the parts of the day that we are involved with. We combine that with what your venue puts together and your other suppliers generally run off that.