Introduction Purpose and Top Five Challenges of Wedding Day Details

In the whirlwind that is a wedding day, the bride and groom rarely get to take in the finer details of the wedding decor that truly make their wedding unique, from the beautiful flowers to the place settings on the tables and the other personal touches designed into the ceremony and reception sites.

Capturing details serves many purposes, not the least of which is capturing memories for the bride and groom who are often too preoccupied to appreciate them on their big day. Detail images also lend themselves to telling a complete wedding story, which will help the bride and groom be able to go back and relive their wedding day through the images; having a complete story’s worth of images can also be especially helpful in putting together a wedding album. On the business side, vendors and venues put in hard work to make the details special, so they’re usually eager to use your images for marketing, which also means they are great tools for your own marketing and networking purposes. For this reason, it is extremely important that you tag all vendors and venues when sharing the images through various social media platforms.

When it comes to actually capturing the details, there are a number of challenges to overcome. We polled 312 photographers with the following question: “What is the most challenging part of photographing ceremony and reception details?”

Here are the top five challenges for capturing details:

1. 41% (127): How to light any scene properly
2. 28% (87): Time constraints/not enough time
3. 21% (64): Details not ready on time
4. 5% (16): Finding the best angle
5. 2% (6): Understanding key shots

We will explore several examples for each of the above challenges throughout this course.