While we are in the hustle and bustle of our full-on wedding season (hence the crickets over here on our blog feed) we are segmenting days on our calendars to meet with our T&V Brides and grooms before their wedding day. This kind of meeting is almost 100% must for us and vastly improves our outlook on an intended wedding day plan. What type of meeting you ask? This is the wedding venue walkthrough.

We’ll make time to meet with our bride and groom, sometimes with their entourage to visit their venue(s). Usually, it’ll be about a month or so before the big day. We’ll go through each part of the property and see where each event will take place, from their ceremony to cocktail hour to portraits to everything in between and more. Quite often venues will be around an hour to maybe 2 hours away from our studio. So why go the extra mile (pun intended) if we can just see the venue sites on the day of?

Here are three reasons we try not to skip this part:

– We don’t like to ‘wing it.’ Sometimes a venue is so versatile that it has many picturesque areas to choose from and sometimes those spots are a little harder to find. We also don’t know what light looks like and if its an outdoor wedding in the middle of October, we know we’ll have to compensate with our own lighting in the evening. We like to plan, and planning prevents any last minute guessing which can then compromise the quality of an image. We also find that it’s quite stressful when we haven’t seen the venue in person at least a day before.

– It’s a timesaver. Most of our job is comprised of anticipating and finding the right angle (plus the light!). Knowing our map beforehand, allows us to figure out the point and place where we can capture and make magic. During an essential part of the event, we don’t want to get ‘lost’ or try to figure where to position ourselves. Trust us, this can become a time consuming and in an event where every second count, this is crucial. By visiting before, it also saves us time in our driving directions. It’ll be less challenging to swerve into a lane that leads us to the middle of nowhere by getting familiar with the road ahead.

– Going through a wedding venue walkthrough allows us to see how our brides and grooms envision their wedding day. We get to look at a draft of how each station will look like on a wedding day. Specific details and characteristics will be pointed out to us, or a little bit about the history of the development of said venue. We enjoy knowing these details because it helps us fuse even more passion into each capture. Often, we get to give a little input into how sunlight will set that day and how things can unfold.

– Bonus: Many times we find ourselves working in large private estates or very lavish venue sites that have their protocols and own way of doing things. Chatting with them before the wedding day helps us honor those protocols making sure that get to be invited back again.

We’ll also site visit a new location for photo shoots for the same reason. Wedding venue walkthroughs are very much like scouting locations for photo shoots. It’s nice to have a plan and even better a plan b should there be a last-minute change or delay.

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