Wedding photography

Eight hours covers most single-venue weddings: the last hour of getting ready, the ceremony, portraits, cocktails, dinner and the first dances. Three things push a day past eight, and it is worth knowing which apply to you before choosing a package. A ceremony and reception more than thirty minutes apart. A first look before the ceremony. And the send-off, which is almost always the thing that turns an eight-hour wedding into a ten-hour one, because it happens at the end by definition.

The planning is where the photographs are actually decided. The venue is walked before the day so the light in each room at each hour is known rather than discovered, and a family-formals list is agreed by name — because nobody can improvise "grandmother side, minus the cousins" in a crowd of a hundred and fifty. Beyond that list, no shot list: a long sequence of saved images turns the day into a checklist and the photographs into somebody else’s wedding.

The getting-ready room is the most underestimated decision of the day. A suite with one large window and the overhead lights off produces the frames couples are most surprised by; a windowless hotel bathroom with fluorescent strip lighting produces the frames they quietly do not print. It costs nothing to ask which room has the window and to put the dress and the make-up chair next to it, and it is worth more to the first two hours of coverage than any equipment.

Six hundred or more retouched photographs within six weeks, with a preview set inside 72 hours so there is something to share while you are still away. Six weeks is honest for that volume in peak season; a photographer quoting two weeks in September is either not editing them or not shooting many weddings. A second photographer covers the ceremony and reception, which is what makes it possible to have both the aisle and the faces watching it. From $3,500.