Photography2 July 20265 min read
The shot list worth handing your guests
Your photographer has the formals covered. These are the twelve moments only the people in the room can catch.
By Ama Kwarteng
A professional photographer is there for the frames you'll frame: the vows, the first look, the portraits at golden hour. What they cannot be is in eleven places at once. The best guest photos are almost never of the couple — they're of the room reacting to the couple.
What to actually ask for
Vague instructions get vague results. "Take lots of photos!" produces forty blurry shots of the back of someone's head. A short, specific list produces keepers.
- The face of whoever is watching the vows, not the vows
- The table before anyone sits down and after everyone leaves
- Whatever the children are doing during the speeches
- The kitchen door, mid-service
- Grandparents dancing, from a distance
- The couple when they think nobody is looking
Where to put the list
On the table card, under the QR code, in no more than three lines. Nobody reads a paragraph at a wedding. If you're printing menus, the back of the menu is the most-read surface in the room.
The photo you'll cry at in ten years is almost never the posed one.
One more thing: tell people they can't get it wrong. The single biggest reason guests don't share photos is not laziness, it's a quiet worry that theirs aren't good enough.
