Wedding guest portraits | Will you regret not having them?
When you think about the guest photos you’d like to have at your wedding, do you feel that candid, fly-on-the-wall photography is going to be best?
If you don’t like being photographed yourself, that would probably be a good enough reason for not imposing it on someone else, wouldn’t it.
The problem with candid photography is that most of it is not funny, sweet, award-winning romantic moments that neither you nor your guests realised were being captured.
Most of it is unflattering, awkward expressions on people that were either talking, eating or drinking when the photo was taken.
I don’t know for sure, but I suspect this may not be how you want to remember your wedding guests in five or 10 years time when you look back on your album and some of those people are no longer in your life.
As photographers, we all try to anticipate moments and shoot through them in the hope of capturing something magical but often that magic doesn’t happen because people notice us and become self-conscious.
One way of improving the odds for your guests can be to invite them to have wedding guest portraits taken by your photographer.
Personally, I’m not advocating either approach. If you want all documentary photography, I’ll do it. If you want wedding guest portraits, I’ll do those. And if you want a mix of the two, I’ll do that as well.
But here are a couple of the pros and cons for wedding guest portraits:
Reasons to have wedding guest portraits
- You’ll have great photos of most of the people that came to your wedding. And so will they, if you choose to share the photos. With documentary photography, lots of guests will be missing from the photos and others will be caught off-guard with unflattering expressions or partly cropped out of images, out of focus, closed eyes, etc., etc.
- Guests have more control over how they look in portraits and can ask for more to be taken if they don’t like the first one. FYI, that didn’t happen with the following pics shot at a recent wedding in Oxford city centre but I always take a few anyway.
Reasons not to have wedding guest portraits
- Guests that don’t like being photographed are not pressured and can avoid it. In reality, they can avoid being photographed even if you decide to have wedding guest portraits. All they have to do is say, ‘no’.Interestingly, at a recent wedding, I was told that the bride’s mother hated being photographed so I didn’t encourage her to have any photos. Weirdly, a couple of hours into proceedings and she was asking me to take her photograph – I’d like to say I know what changed but I’ve actually got no idea.
- You don’t want to force your wishes on people. It’s almost certainly true to say that your guests are attending your wedding to be part of your special day so, chances are, most would want to oblige to make you happy.
If I want to have wedding guest portraits, what should I say to my guests?
When it comes to taking wedding guest portraits, I wouldn’t recommend discussing it with guests in advance. Just let guests decide on the day if they want to be photographed or not.
If brides and grooms ask me to do wedding guest portraits, I’ll approach couples and small groups of guests and ask if I can take a photo for the wedding album. Some guests will have ideas of their own but most say, ‘what do you want us to do?’ and I tell them. It’s as simple as that.
In my case, if you don’t ask me to take guest portraits, I’ll assume you don’t want them and I’ll just take candid photos. If a guest asks for a photo, as some always do, then I’ll oblige otherwise it’s just documentary.
When wedding guest portraits became couple portraits for me
If you attended any weddings as lockdown was easing, you’ll know that weddings were small intimate affairs.
As a photographer, it’s quite difficult to go unnoticed at a wedding with 30 guests (or fewer) so candid photography took something of a back seat. To fill the time between the ceremony and the wedding breakfast, a lot of my couples opted to have guest portraits.
Since time was plentiful, I decided to bring everything I had to the task. The story behind the wedding guest portraits that follow comes from one of my weddings during lockdown.
I know that having your portrait taken can be a scary affair – I’m not that keen myself – but I have found that being outside can help to reduce those feelings of anxiety for a lot of people.
On this particular day in July, it was quite breezy outside so by the time we’d all lunged in the direction of the light a few times to save it from falling over, my couple had pretty much forgotten about being camera shy.
I think it also helped for them to see how the photos looked on the back of the camera.
Whether I’m taking portraits or doing documentary photography, I will often continue shooting after you think I’ve taken the photo as these are sometimes the photos I really want to capture.
You can probably see from the second and third picture above that it wasn’t a painful process for my couple. And from this point forward it was more or less plain-sailing.
For the next shot, I wanted to create some lens flare but the sun was behind clouds so I used my light to provide a hair light and emulate sun flare in the top right-hand corner.
For the last of my portraits, we moved to another spot in the garden and I took this simple portrait with the wedding venue in the background.
Now that weddings have returned to normal, so have my guest portraits.
However, if you’d like to show your love for a special couple attending your wedding, I’d be happy to do a mini shoot as part of the photography for your day. Just let me know when booking.
And don’t forget to let me know your preference for documentary guest photos or portraits.
For more information on my approach to weddings, visit my FAQ.
You can find more examples of my work by visiting my Oxford wedding photographer page or simply viewing my portfolio.