Tips For Making Group Portraits Fast And Easy

We get asked time and time again that you don’t want your formal portraits to take forever! We get it too, it’s boring for you and your guests and it takes a huge chunk out of your wedding day where you could be doing something more fun! Plus will you even use these photos of your extended family?

1. Limit The Number of Portraits

This is key for your portraits not to take forever, it’s very easy to make a list the length of your arm but if time is important on your day try and cut back on the amount of group photos you want, think about if you will really use those photographs, are they important to you?

2. Make sure you leave enough time

You’d be surprised how many couples don’t leave any time in their wedding day schedule for photographs, if you do want lots of formal portraits please speak to you photographer and discuss how long this is likely to take. We recommend leaving at least 2-3 mins per group photo.

3. Stick to your schedule

know it’s easier said then done in some circumstances but if don’t allocate yourself enough time to get ready in the morning then sadly it’ll be your photographer who gets the hit later in the day.

4. Allocate a friend or family member to be your photographers point of contact

Taking the actual photo is super quick it’s organising all of your guests which is the time consuming bit, we recommend having a having a friend or family member that knows everyone (a couple of groomsmen often works well for this) and they’ll be able to grab the guests required for the next shot whilst your photographer is photographing the current shot, when this is done properly it runs super smoothly!

5. List your photographs in a good order

For our clients we do this for them but not every photographer does, we do these to limit the movement of guests and risk loosing them in between photos.

This is the template which we follow, we also get a list from our clients of names of everyone and what role they play so that we can put names next to each photograph.

• Bride and Groom with Brides Grandparents (we find placing grandparents first works best if they have mobility trouble)

• Bride and Groom with Groom’s Grandparents

• Bride and Groom with Bride’s Parents

• Bride and Groom with Bride’s Parent’s and Bride’s Siblings

• Bride and Groom with Bride’s Parent’s, Brides’s siblings, Groom’s Parent’s and Groom’s Sibing’s.

• Bride and Groom with Groom’s Parents and Groom’s siblings.

• Bride and Groom with Groom’s Parents. (If you want a picture of most sets of parents together then the bride’s parents can be added in again at this point)

• Bride with Bridesmaids

• Bride and groom with Bridesmaids

• Bride and Groom with Bridesmaids, Groomsmen, and children in wedding party.

• Bride and Groom with Groomsmen

• Groom with Groomsmen

6. Let everyone know beforehand who’s required for a group photograph

Close family members don’t always realise they’re needed for group photos, we’ve spent many a group photo session waiting for the mother of the bride to check into her hotel room or waiting for Uncle bob to come back from the toilet, sometimes guests head straight to the venue from the church not knowing that they’re about to miss out, these things can really eat into your time!!

A little tip to stop your guests from disappearing from the church is to do the confetti AFTER the group photos, everyone loves the confetti, it’s something no one wants to miss!

7. Pick a nice location which is central to where everyone is milling around

If everyone is watching you having your group photos taken then this is easy to just grab people out of the crowd!

We hope these tips were useful as part of your wedding planning journey, let us know in the comments how you got on and if you have any other tips!