How to actually get the most out of your wedding day.

After photographing well over 100 weddings, I can confidently say this, most couples accidentally spend huge chunks of their wedding day doing things they don’t actually care about.

A lot of the day gets swallowed up by small talk. Distant relatives. People you haven’t seen in years. Friends’ partners you’ve never met before. Going table to table making sure everyone’s okay. Checking if people have drinks. Worrying if the cake’s arrived. Wondering whether Auntie Deborah is behaving herself. Before you know it, half the day has disappeared and you’ve barely spent any actual time together. That’s why one of the biggest bits of advice I can give couples is this, don’t turn your wedding into a meet and greet.

If there are people you haven’t spoken to in years and realistically won’t speak to again afterwards, you genuinely do not need to invite them. Your wedding is not a family reunion organised to keep everyone else happy. It should feel like a room full of your favourite humans celebrating your relationship properly. And honestly, if you do want lots of people there, make it a weekend. Have drinks the night before. Have a barbecue. Go for food. Get all the catching up and small talk out of the way before the wedding itself so that on the actual day, you can skip straight to having a laugh and enjoying yourselves instead of spending the whole time introducing yourselves to someone’s new boyfriend.

Because every single couple says the same thing to me at the end of the night: “That went so fast.”

And they’re right. The whole thing flies by in a blur. One minute you’re getting ready in the morning, next thing you know you’re stood on the dance floor wondering where the last twelve hours disappeared to. That’s why it’s so important to intentionally slow the day down emotionally. Not by stopping the schedule, but by stopping yourself from mentally hosting the entire thing.

You do not need to manage the wedding.

You’ve hired good suppliers. Your venue staff know what they’re doing. Your photographer has a plan. Your wedding party can help round people up. Let everybody else handle the logistics while you actually live the day you’ve spent all this money planning.

One of the biggest things couples should do more of is simply staying together. Move through your wedding day as a unit. Talk to guests together. Play the games together. Dance together. Go grab drinks together. Experience the chaos together. Because when couples accidentally spend the whole day separated on opposite sides of the venue talking to different groups of people, they end up making separate memories instead of shared ones. Photographically, it makes a massive difference too. The best candid moments happen naturally when you’re together interacting with the people you love most. If you and your partner are stood laughing with your grandparents, or hugging friends on the dance floor, or chatting with your wedding party while the sun’s going down, those photos become infinitely more meaningful because they’re shared moments. Years down the line, those images will matter far more than some perfectly posed Pinterest shot ever could.

That’s something couples rarely realise until after the wedding. None of the little details mattered anywhere near as much as they thought they would. The colour of the napkins. The exact shade of the flowers. Whether somebody wore the “wrong” shoes. None of it carries the emotional weight you think it does at the time. What matters is who was there and how the day felt.

That’s also why I firmly believe your wedding should always feel like a wedding day first and a photoshoot second. Yes, photos matter. Obviously they matter. But the whole point of the photos is to capture you genuinely enjoying your wedding, not disappearing for three hours to create content for Instagram. Across an entire wedding day, I probably only steal you away for less than an hour in total, spread across different little moments. My job is always to get you back to your people as quickly as possible so you can keep making memories instead of standing around performing for a camera.

One of the most underrated parts of a wedding day for me is the speeches. Not the awful 45-minute ones where someone reads a life story off their phone and everybody mentally leaves the room halfway through. I mean proper speeches. Short ones. Honest ones. The ones where somebody tells a funny story about the couple, or explains why they love them, or shares a little insight into who they are as people. Good speeches genuinely change the atmosphere in a room. Suddenly everybody understands the couple a bit more deeply. People laugh together. Cry together. Learn things they never knew before. It creates connection in a way very few other moments during the day can.

At the end of it all, you’ll get the most out of your wedding day when you stop trying to perfectly manage every second of it and actually let yourself live it instead. The couples who have the best weddings are never the ones obsessing over timelines, décor and whether things are going exactly to plan. They’re the ones who let go, stay present, laugh through the chaos and properly throw themselves into the experience together.