Wedding planning advice from a photographer! Part One - Picking a Venue
How to plan a wedding
So as some of you may know we are getting married out in Tenerife at the end of April and I posted a question on Instagram a short while ago, asking if people would be interested in hearing about our planning process and some of the things we were thinking about with respect to planning our wedding. There was a pretty positive response, so now that we are slightly under 10 weeks out, I thought I would write up a short blog series explaining how we have gone about putting our plans together.
Now first things first, I may be a wedding photographer, but I am not a wedding planner. Fortunately, I have a wonderful fiancee who is, in fact, a wedding planner… and I won't lie, she is definitely doing a fair bit of the work. That said, I think that our favourite weddings over the last several years have always been the ones that have had at least some level of agency from both sides of the couple so here’s my first piece of advice: blokes (and it is usually the blokes), please don't take a backseat. Get involved, and don't be a guest to your own wedding day.
Budget
I know that all these wedding blogs start the same way, but it's the first thing you really need to work out… what is the budget for your wedding. I won't harp on about it too much because I know that fiscal responsibility is not that sexy… so I'm gonna get on with the fun stuff instead. The one thing I will say, is that the only thing less sexy than fiscal responsibility, is going into a huge amount of debt for your wedding day. Honestly, don't do it.
I mean, we’re great and all, but I would be devastated to hear you had sold your car or lost your house just to have us shoot your wedding…
If you do want an extended blog post that goes into detail all about budgeting then go and check out Abigail’s blog all about it over on her planning site: www.ratherbewed.co.uk!
So what’s important to you?
I think sitting down with your partner and really having a chat about what is important to you with respect to the wedding is almost as important as the budget itself. If you know, for example, that inviting your whole extended family is vital or, that like us, you wanted to enjoy dinner outside in the Sun, then that is likely going to inform many of the other decisions you're going to make going forward.
We've been to loads of weddings that have had a huge list of guests, but for us, we felt a smaller celebration was more in keeping with our vision. We don't have a big guest list for the wedding day itself, so with respect to our venue search, this meant we were able to search out smaller more bespoke locations rather than paying for space we wouldn't need.
We are big travellers ourselves and we love good food, and eating in nice places - so this was also something that was important for us. We always set our sights on a destination wedding. We've been to so many over the years as wedding photographers and that extended celebration has always been something that really appealed to us. That said, with our budget, we knew that we had to pick a location that wasn't too far away and had easy access to good quality food et cetera.
The other thing that was important to us, was that we performed our ceremony on our 10 year anniversary. This meant that the date was set and we needed to find a venue or country where we could eat nice food outside on April 26th. Obviously, nowhere is immune from an unseasonable downpour, but this gave us a starting point to our search. Our first inclination was to look across the Mediterranean and we had a couple of calls with venue owners in the Greek islands and we even checked out several across Corsica, Majorca, Sicily and Spain, but the feedback we received from them was that at this time of year, it might be a little bit cold in the evening to sit outside.
Picking a location and venue
In the search for warmer weather, we decided to look closer towards the equator and briefly considered the Caribbean. When it came to budget though, we knew that we couldn't afford to fly all of our friends out to somewhere like Barbados and we didn’t feel comfortable asking them to do so.
So instead we continued our search somewhere slightly closer to home. We had visited Tenerife a couple of years ago and had a great time in the National park, and while driving around the coastline. There is another photographer and planner couple based on the island whose work I have followed for a number of years called Licandro weddings and we decided to get in touch to ask them for some advice.
Helen and Juan were very helpful and offered up a number of potential venues that were suitable for our proposed guest list and took into account the things that were important to us. We eventually settled on a stunning venue up in the hills that could accommodate our family and friends.
Flights to Tenerife are between £50 and £150 most days of the week, so we felt comfortable asking our guests to make their own way out there, and we were comfortable covering their accommodation and food when they reached us in country.
Up Next: Pinterest, Invites, and Vendors
The next blog in this series will cover inspiration, how we designed our invites, and found some of our vendors - follow us on instagram and keep an eye out for posts and stories and we’ll see you there!
Planning a wedding can be a big undertaking, so if you would like to have a chat with someone that’s been involved with more than a few. Then drop Abigail a line, and check out her work at https://www.ratherbewed.com/