Planning Your Wedding Timeline

Your wedding day is one of the most important and memorable days of your life, and creating a well-organized wedding timeline is essential to ensure everything goes smoothly. Planning a wedding can be overwhelming, but with a carefully crafted timeline, you can minimise stress and make sure you enjoy every moment of your special day. In this blog post, we'll walk you through the steps to create a wedding timeline that suits your unique style and needs.

BRIDE & GROOM PREP

There’s no doubt that weddings can go over the intended timeline so it’s best to give yourselves more time than less. This comes straight from the bosses, key information that you would not otherwise get so be grateful! A standard guideline would be to start bridal prep three hours before the wedding ceremony and groom prep two hours before. Two hours for the bridal party to prep and an additional hour for travel, the same goes for the groom, an hour for prep and an extra hour for travel because you can never trust traffic!

Two whole hours for bridal preparations may seem like a drastically long time but there are various factors to consider such as the time it takes for hair and makeup. Mess-ups are always a possibility and thus it's super important to go for a trial run before your big day, as mentioned in our blog ‘Unveiling Unexpected Wedding Expenses’, to ensure the look you desire is perfectly designed and that the time allocated for hair and makeup does not go over. Additionally, you may wish to have fun and pose for a few photos with your bridesmaids or family members and this should not be a rushed operation.

Let’s not forget the most important part, the letter and gift exchange! While it may seem like a quick process, reading, exchanging and crying (don’t lie, we know you will!) may take a considerably long time with all the emotions running through the air.

CEREMONY

The sweet spot for a ceremony is the early afternoon! Ceremonies don’t typically go over an hour unless it's religious, so if your ceremony starts at around 1 pm and finishes at 2 pm, there’s around four hours till the reception, ample enough time for travel, set up and photos/videos.

However, keep in mind that the location of your ceremony vs. reception has to be taken into account. For example, if your ceremony is in Caversham but the reception is back in the city of Perth, travel time will eat into the entire timeline. In this scenario, it’ll be best to get an earlier time slot for your ceremony to ensure that travel time doesn't eat into the photo or reception time. The rule of thumb is that if you expect travel time to be 30 mins, double it!

RECEPTION

It’s party time!!!

Typically starting at 6 pm, there’s no doubt that the end of the day will not be any earlier than 10 pm. We have the welcome toast, dinner service, speeches by not only the best man and maid of honour but also by the parents, the first dance, maybe even a dance battle, dances with the parents and a whole dance party. The party does not stop there, you’ve got to cut the cake and toss the bouquet all whilst capturing candid reactions and moments. Additionally, if your culture has any special traditions, this will have to be taken into account as well. For example, a Chinese couple would have to take into account a tea ceremony and/ or lion dances during the reception.

One can never predict the future so you may run overtime but typically vendors and hires are more than willing to extend the package so don’t let it ruffle your feathers.

Wedding timelines are extremely important in determining the flow of the shoot and tell us how much time we have and how fast we need to be in order to get the job done. Whilst spontaneous moments are great for candid shots, a wedding timeline is still required as it also gives us directions for our creative vision amidst all the time constraints. Minimise the worries so that you don’t wrinkle too fast and plan that wedding timeline to a tea!

Trying to plan your wedding timeline but have no idea where to start? Contact us and we’ll be more than happy to help you out!