After the... lively... discussion generated from part 1 of this series, I'm a little afraid to leave my apartment at night, let alone to continue writing about the frustrating elements of weddings. But alas, I feel compelled to make future weddings better. And said compulsion clearly outweighs my paranoia, because here we are.
The longest wait you'll ever know
Well, it's up there with the lobby at the DMV
[Disclaimer: if you're married, and I was at your wedding, and there was a long wait involved, please accept on faith that I'm not referring to your wedding specifically in the discourse that follows. Let's still be friends.]
Imagine being at a concert. The band plays an amazing set, then leaves the stage amid wild cheers for an encore. Then, feeding off the cheers of the crowd, they dramatically return for 2 final songs.
Now imagine that the time span between the exit and encore was not 2 minutes or 5 minutes, but... two and a half hours.
There are obiously huge differences between the norms and expectations of a concert and a wedding, but hear me out for one more paragraph. Just as the encore is the culmination of a concert and the natural response to its attendees' excitement, a wedding reception is... yeah, you get it.
So how does it make sense to have all the guests wait for the reception a super long time while the wedding party takes hundreds of pictures off in a secluded meadow? By the time they arrive and are announced, those people still awake must often think, "Oh yeah, that's why I'm dressed up in a room with all these people."
Now, as I mentioned in the last post, not every wedding situation is the same. During one year-long wait, I might be surrounded by a bunch of friends having a blast. But at another, I might be without a date and only knowing zero or two people.
Furthermore, there's the whole issue of food and drink. If I have to wait eons, it makes a world of difference if I'm doing it with a parched throat and rumbling stomach vs. surrounded by an open bar and hors d'oeuvres.
I've never planned a wedding, nor have I gone through the brainstorming process for fun, so I can't offer a solution for how to remove this lifetime of picture-taking between wedding and reception. But please think of the lonely outsiders at your reception. And their empty stomachs.
What do you think?
Go ahead and comment now... I obviously don't like waiting.
Have you ever had a terrible wait at a wedding reception?
Can you think of a way to expedite or reschedule the post-wedding, pre-reception pictures?
Jon
Alright, so as a person who has been the reason why people wait, the wedding photographer, I have been on both sides and understand the situation.
ReplyDeleteThink about it the bride will never again be in this dress which is usually anywhere from $500 to $10,000 ($10,000 being the extreme Say Yes to the Dress kind of dresses. Anyways, this bride (and the family who is paying for it) is going to want this thing and all of the other dresses and what not to be remembered.
Then you have the obligatory family pictures you have to take at the church, and most the time it takes great grandma Gigi a while to mosey on up to the front of the sanctuary, then you have to put Uncle Jon next to her to hold her up and snap the whole family picture, the bride's family, the groom's family, just mom and dad, mom and step dad, then mom, dad, step dad but no step mom because no one likes her and the list goes on.
After all of that is when the fun part comes, but you have to travel, make sure you have all the flowers, someone has to clean up the church, etc etc.
Finally once the process gets started everyone starts feeling like rock stars with the paparazzi following them saying "look here!" and "now pose here." It is usually a slow start but people usually end up enjoying a photo shoot.
So add all of those things together, plus the planning and organizing of how everyone is going to walk in to some Black Eyed Pea song, this process is not an easy one and every time I have done this, I have had the guests waiting in the back of my mind stressing me out.
Note: It was extremely difficult to do this when the ceremony took place where the reception was. Not only was everyone waiting, but they were also watching us from the windows... talk about STRESSFUL.
Sorry if this was a little scattered, the computer is just about to die, so this was typed out quickly.
I don't know how valid of a solution this is, but a wedding I was in did all pictures of bridesmaids, groomsmens, each side of the families, etc. BEFORE the wedding, so that the only thing to take up time between the ceremony and reception was the pictures with the bride and groom together. Obviously the pictures with bride and groom together are most important, but it saves a lot of time to do others beforehand because it's less people looming around afterward, like random uncles, grandmas, etc. and the wedding party can focus on speeding the process along for them. Just one experience I've had. While waiting decades for the couple at the reception, I've never been at a place where there wasn't food or drink, so that made it more bearable, as well as some cute things to pass the time like a game amongst guests at a table or a photobooth thing for the couple. Summary..there are ways to make the wait bearable if time is taken to strategize and be creative, but the day is primarily for the newlyweds, so have a book to pass the time, just to be safe:-)
ReplyDeleteI'm with Sara Z on this one. I too was part of a wedding where we did the big group photos prior to the ceremony. All the groomsmen, the best men, the fraternity brothers, groom + dad, groom + dad-in-law, just groom, groom + young cousin not in wedding party but along for the ride, groom + vanity shots, etc. The photographer also had another camera-jockey doing the same thing with the bridesmaids, except replace dad with mom, etc.
ReplyDeleteThe only pictures we had after the ceremony were of the entire wedding party, bride + groom + both sets of parents, and then just a few bride + groom. I think it took a grand total of 45 minutes between the church and the reception hall, including DC traffic crosstown from Georgetown to the Mall. And even then, they had started the cocktail hour beforehand, so that there were never gaps of time larger than 30 minutes. That said, it was a fantastically planned wedding that, I'm guessing, cost around the $1mil range. But when you're schmoozing with sitting Congressmen and DC attorneys in the Mellon Auditorium, it's probably a smoothly planned event.
Most of the ones I've attended have had long waits, but it seems the norm rather than the exception. Something clearly needs to be done about that.
Out of curiosity, just because I have never done anything like that and I will be shooting another wedding this weekend. Is there a picture with the bride and groom with the whole family or did they just nix that picture due to time?
ReplyDeleteI have heard of people doing that and as long as they are ok with that, that's not a problem. I also know some couples that do all of them before hand, meaning they ruin the first look walking down the aisle, and I would not recommend doing that to anyone. It wasn't the same when the bride walked down the aisle at all, she barely looked at the groom. Also, everyone ended up having to wait for the food to get there anyways so it didn't really help with the whole sitting around thing, it was odd.
Same frustration, and same lack of solution here! As long as the company and food are good, as you say, I'm content to wait a little while.
ReplyDelete