5 Tips To Help Plan Family Wedding Portraits

Since the invention of the camera we have sought to preserve the legacy of family through formal group portraits, and a wedding day can be the perfect place to capture these. For one thing, you already have a professional wedding photographer on hand, additionally a wedding is one of the few events that brings multiple generations of your family together.

However, family portraits at a wedding can also be a huge source of anxiety, and they can sometimes be a huge time suck in the day when you’d rather be doing other things such as enjoying drinks at cocktail hour and hanging out with your favorite people.

We’ve been in these family portraits at our own wedding and in other family weddings. We’ve also taken thousands of these family portraits for our couples. As you start to plan this part of your own wedding we want to share a few tips. These rules can always be broken, but we hope they help you as you plan your own family portraits…

Remember The Reason

We’d encourage you to focus on the purpose rather than the enjoyment factor. YOUR wedding day was a catalyst to bring together generations of your family. Your story mattered and people traveled to be there for the celebration. Not only does your story matter, but the story of your entire family matters. Freezing this moment in time with your family in a portrait preserves the legacy. These photos tend to grow in value over time, especially when loved ones pass away. If you’re feeling stress, just remember that this is worth it!

2. PLAN AHEAD

There’s no reason for family portraits to take up a large portion of your wedding day. With some simple planning you can define all of the must-have portraits and help ensure they go smoothly and swiftly. We capture this with our couples as part of our final planning questionnaire as we get all of the various combinations and then come up with a time budget based on that list. We can adjust the list up or down based on timing recommendations and what our couple wants. When we get to the day itself, having this prep work done means that we can breeze through the list and get everyone organized and then on to the party.

Lastly, we encourage you to email everyone that will be included in portrait time and let them know when and where they need to be. This helps ensure that everyone is in the right spot and you don’t need to spend time chasing down the cousin that went to the bathroom or the uncle that’s already at the bar.

3. Quality Over Quantity

Just because you can rearrange your family into 50 unique combinations doesn’t mean you should. We’d encourage you to think about the combinations of family members that you would print and frame on your living room wall, or put into your wedding album. Try to keep that goal in mind so you focus on the shots that really matter. It’s easy to re-arrange and come up with a million combinations, but you’re likely looking for a couple specific photos that truly matter. When in doubt, just ask, “Would I frame this?”

4. DON’T LEAVE YOUR SPOUSE OUT!

One thing that we sometimes see are combinations of portraits that have one spouse stepping in and out of every other photo. For example, a group portrait with the bride’s family that includes the groom, and one without him. This isn’t a hard rule for us, but we would challenge you to think about a situation where you would want to print a family portrait that doesn’t include both of you in it. The entire purpose of the day is your marriage and the joining of families! With the exception of maybe the occasional sibling photo, keep yourselves together!

5. Let Important Couples Get Their Portraits Too

While most of our tips help reduce the number of portraits and the time spent taking them, this last one is a notable exception. How often does your family get dressed up and have a professional photographer? Let your parents and grandparents get their portrait taken, just the two of them. They’ll be deeply honored that you thought of them and it may be the first time they’ve had a professional portrait taken in years.