Our Simple Guide to Planning Your Wedding Ceremony

Planning your wedding ceremony can feel overwhelming and often gets stressful, however, it happens to be one of the rewarding aspects of planning the wedding. There’s this sense of accomplishment when you are able to get things running as planned.

You’ll get to choose the venue, florals, music, photographer and style of photography and so much more. In this article, we’ll focus on giving quick short tips so that you get the gist of it and don’t have to fret.

After shooting a number of weddings and ensuring that as much as possible we help meet the goals of our couples even beyond just the photography, there are a number of things we know and will be sharing in this post.

1. The Order

If you plan to have a religious or cultural wedding ceremony, then the order will most likely be set as you’ll be following it as traditionally expected. However, if you are not, then you’ll need to figure out what you intend to do for the ceremony.

A non-religious wedding ceremony would typically include the following:

• Processional: This refers to the group of people walking down the aisle in a specific order to mark the beginning of a wedding ceremony. The processional often includes a permutation of the officiant, the wedding party, flower girls, ring bearers, and the bride and groom and their parents. You may need to consider the music you want when walking down the aisle.
• Welcome: A basic speech to most likely get everyone started and remind guests of the reason for the day.
• Introduction and/or remarks on marriage: This follows and could be embedded in the Welcome speech as well.
• Readings: If you choose a religious wedding ceremony reading, you’ll likely select a passage or verse from a sacred text, or a religious poem or blessing. A secular reading can be a poem, book excerpt, song lyrics, or even lines from a movie or television show.
• Vow exchange: This is always a romantic one and an opportunity to share your love for each other to your family and friends, but of course, yourselves in the presence of witnesses. You may want to write this out and have a theme in mind.
• Ring Exchange: which is a symbol of the commitment you make to each other on the wedding day. Couples can exchange rings as part of their wedding vows, in which case, no ring vows are needed, or they may have a separate wedding ring exchange following the wedding vows.
• First kiss
• Unity ceremony: is a symbolic ritual woven into the wedding ceremony. Among the most common unity ceremonies are handfasting, circling, and the lighting of a unity candle.
• Final remarks and announcement of the newlyweds usually by the officiant
• Recessional: This is the wedding exit song. sIt’s played as the newlywed couple descend down the aisle followed by their guests – and it should be triumphant!

Depending on what’s of most importance to you, you can decide to move things around to make it much more custom. Remember that it’s always a great idea to plan together with your spouse so that you can incorporate what your visions are into one piece that remains something you are happy to think about.

Read: Tips For Writing Your Own Personalized Wedding Vows

Read: How To Select The Perfect Wedding Ring

2. The Timing

Wedding ceremonies are usually short but not too short. Does that make sense? The whole idea is to keep it brief so that you can gain everyone’s attention and yet now have the ceremony feel too rushed.

Typically, the wedding ceremony length is between 20 to 30 mins especially when it’s unconventional. So when planning, try as much as possible to keep this in mind and communicate the same with your officiant.

3. The Theme

Since we love love, this is something that we are really thrilled to discuss. The truth is that the theme of your wedding is eventually going to be captured in your wedding photographs. As a result, this is something you want to focus on.

When it comes to planning your wedding theme, think of your past, the present, and where you both are headed as your lives begin to unfold as a couple.

Storytelling becomes very integral. Discuss with your officiant to look at ways where you can get bits into your vows, the readings the ring exchange, etc. that incorporate your history and how your journey together began.

The truth is that as photographers we find that when these stories come up, the light and brightness shines through your photographs. There are smiles, love tears, body language, and so on that will show off in your photos. We love to tell these stories when capturing moments, so you’ll be happy to look at your wedding photos and continue to cherish these moments for a lifetime.

Did this article help you? Let us know what you’ll like to see on our blog next. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us, our Head of Customer Operations will be happy to assist you even beyond answering photography-related questions.

We hope you’ll give us the opportunity to document this beautiful time of your life! To book an appointment with us, call/ text: +1 416 436 0401 or send an email to allenobastudios@gmail.com.

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