Getting Your Money's Worth,

I probably shouldn't write some of this, or at least I shouldn't post a part of it, but whatever...

When it comes to wedding photography I know a lot of people have opinions on how expensive it can be and there are a lot of people who claim they don't have the budget for it so could a friend or family member do them a favour or would a photography student do it for cheap or for snacks or something. I realise that it can be a pretty huge expense, especially if you're DIYing a lot of the wedding day, but good photos don't just happen.

It's worth mentioning that there is a lot of pressure on a photographer to get the perfect wedding photos, with shot lists, expectations of styles and all that as well as things like family members expecting to use the opportunity to get some free family portraits (translation: family portraits paid for by someone else). It's not just on Reddit, I have genuinely seen it happen. There's also the whole thing of giving up their weekend - photography very often isn't someone's main job - travelling, all of the correspondence leading up to a wedding and all of the editing afterwards to get a perfect or as close to perfect as possible of the happiest day of a couple's lives. When booking, it might seem like you're paying upwards of £100 an hour, or sometimes a hell of a lot more than that, but let's not pretend that the hours on site at the wedding are the only hours that a photographer is working on your wedding.

With all of that said, it's still a hefty bill, so how do you make the most out of it? 

For us, we have a couple of spaces in our house which are currently occupied with almost like stock photo sort of things, which we will be replacing with our wedding photos. We know there will be certain family members who will want a photo in their house, too, which is fine, but when you think about the number of photos you get - I think our package includes something like 300 fully edited photos or something - how do you make the most of those when you've spent as much as you have? 

I guess one good way is to make sure that other parts of the family do get to enjoy the opportunity for family portraits, as long as you feel you have enough of you as a couple and enough family photographs with the bride and groom etc. Or you could post them all over social media at literally any given opportunity? 

I'm not talking about posting just after your wedding, or on your anniversary, or even the cutesy little anniversaries that some people know, and love, and remember, like the first date, when you became "official", your first kiss and all that, but things that have NOTHING to do with your wedding, but are an excuse to trot out the photos again like no other photos of that person exist or no one else has ever got married. 

Things like, sister's birthday - here's a photo of sister and the couple or one of the couple, and it's the only one you post congratulating them on their birthday, or the first 3 of 5 are from your wedding before two random ones - a child in the family has a last day of school or birthday or other milestone, and again, the only photos used or the main photos are from your wedding... It might be just me, but I find it kind of annoying, and kind of a bit selfish or self involved. I know weddings are a big thing and it's something you spend more time planning and stressing about than you actually get enjoying it, because the typical thing is to spend between 9 to 18 months planning and the event is just a day, but I do think people can be insane about it, especially people who go on about their wedding year, or whatever. I referred to an appointment as 'the Monday of wedding week' earlier and I was nearly sick in my own mouth as I said it, because yeah, it's the week of our wedding, and yes, we're going to be pretty busy getting stuff done that week, but I don't expect anyone else other than my future husband, my son (and even that one isn't really by choice) myself and maybe our parents at a push to give a stuff. 

When it gets to the day of the wedding, yeah, I kind of expect people to give a rat's behind, and if things aren't to their taste or what they would have done, I don't want to hear it, because it's not about them. If the photographer is busy trying to get our photos and they try to interrupt, I will probably get snippy, because we have our priorities for photos and that's what's important, but I'm not going to be spending the next few years posting them all over social media because for one thing my son will be on a lot of them and we're not posting him, and for another, I just don't expect everyone to care for too long afterwards.

As a tangent from all of this as well, I don't think I know the etiquette for posting your wedding photos on social media...

It's not so much about posting ours, but for weddings we attend I wonder when is the right time to mention or remind people we don't post photos of our son and don't want them to either, especially not on public profiles. But is that just restricted to kids? We have a couple of kids in the family that aren't posted onto social media and some of it is parental choice and some of it isn't (e.g. one is technically in foster and as a blanket rule foster children cannot be posted) but what about adult who don't use social media or who don't like photos being taken of them or don't like them being posted? Do you mention it before the wedding? Surely you can't mention it during the wedding!?! How long after should you leave it? Do you wait until a photo is posted and then ask for it to be removed? Well then the permissions or copyright or whatever has already been passed to the social media company or whatever, so surely that's too late? 

I really have no idea how to navigate that. 

Can You Play Musical Chairs At A Wedding?,

Genuine question because it would honestly make certain things in life, or at least during wedding planning, a lot easier, but it would make things a lot more difficult.

On the plus side, it would take out the need to do a table plan, which is a big thing, because it's not just the display, the ideas of how you do the display, how you put it up (does it go on an easel or a stand or have it's own legs or what?) or about everyone who tries to get involved and say who they will or won't sit with or anything like that, but it is the sitting down and thinking which personalities will mesh well, who is going to clash and who will bring the drama and who will calm the drama. It's about who is going to be shy or feel awkward, who gets nervous and word vomits all over who they are next to (and how the person next to them is going to take that) and all of the other bits that you worry about when you're putting people together for a stretch of at least an hour and a half. If you tell everyone it's a game of musical chairs you take the stress out of it for yourself, but then the problem is you pass it onto your guests and for us that would be horrible for a few people, because a few of them are travelling to the wedding on their own. For people that don't know anyone, it would be really hard.

As if passing the stress on isn't bad enough, and let's face it, it would be bad enough because some people are quite vocal about their disapproval of certain things at weddings, if you've planned a plated meal like we have, it would make it impossible for the venue. I read of a wedding group recently that someone was trying to do a plated meal but without options, so if you could find a dish that worked for everyone then yeah, maybe that works, but we have multiple people with allergies, people with multiple allergies, dietary requirements and sensory food issues, so unless we did something like chips, which let's face it, is not a meal, it wouldn't work. 

I mean, I suppose the answer to all of that is to have a buffet, but I would still worry that it means guests who have come on their own would struggle, and people you would genuinely like to introduce may never meet, and also buffets are, at least to me, somewhat problematic, because it all just feels like snack food and a wedding is a long day (or at least ours feels like it could be) and I need more than snack food to get me through it, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

We started on our seating plan weeks ago and honestly found it a struggle, as many people do, but when we sat and looked at it again, pretty much determined that we were going to get it done that evening come hell or high blood pressure, we didn't even argue. We debated a couple of things, looked at it from personalities and also the maths of how many people fit on each table, but then it didn't take too long to come up with something that we thought actually fit the majority of people or was at least the best that we could do. 

And if all else fails, or someone tries to bring the drama, or a couple of people get too into their politics or anything like that, it kind of becomes musical chairs at the evening do anyway, because there are a few more people and the assigned seating kind of idea goes a bit out of the window, doesn't it? In theory people will move around, chat, dance and all that, or at least I would hope that they would...