One thing I’ve learned while blogging is that people get themselves worked up over the strangest things. One of the most popular posts here at SuperNoVABride is "Asking your guests not to take wedding photos? Are you crazy?" that I wrote in response to a few blog posts I had read. Talk about controversial!
A recent commenter, who agreed that guests should be allowed to take pictures at weddings, pointed out something that was also an issue at our wedding.
So, I’m about to backpedal a little bit. I do have one exception to my argument that you should allow guests to take photos at your wedding.
Do not allow guests to take photos during formal portraits. For some couples, this won’t be an issue. They’re whisked off to a different location to have their portraits taken in between the wedding and the ceremony. While we had our own bride and groom portraits taken before the wedding ceremony, we set aside about 15 minutes after the ceremony to take family portraits.
The location where we had our portraits taken was set back about 20 feet from the path that guided guests from the ceremony location to the reception location. A few overly eager family members tried to take their own photographs while the professional photographers were taking theirs.
Why was this problematic? Well, it only mostly happened with photos with the ring bearer and flower girl, was that they were getting a bit thrown off by all the different cameras and ended up sometimes looking into the wrong camera. In fact, this even prompted our photographer to say in a playful voice, "Hey, look at my camera, don’t look at them," while trying to get the attention of our two-year old flower girl.
So there. I admit there is an exception to my sweeping statement that you should never forbid your guests from taking photographs.
