If you take one thing from this journal, make it this: find out what time the sun sets on your wedding date, and build the day backwards from it. Everything else — the meal, the speeches, the cake — can move by twenty minutes and nobody will notice. The sun will not negotiate.
What actually happens at each time
A midday ceremony gives you hard overhead light, squinting guests and shadows under everybody’s eyes. It is the hardest light of the entire day and it is the time most people pick, because it feels like the sensible middle of the afternoon.
An hour before sunset gives you low, warm, directional light that makes everyone look like the best version of themselves without anyone doing anything. It is not a photography trick. It is just what that light does.
Ask your photographer what time sunset is before you fix the ceremony time, not after.
The twenty minutes that matter
Almost every couple portrait I am proud of was taken in the forty minutes before sunset. If your day allows it, step out of your reception for twenty of them. You will be gone before anyone has finished their drink.
In June that might be nine in the evening, which sounds absurd until you are standing in it. In October it is half past five and you will be glad you planned around it.
If the timings will not move
Then they will not move, and it is genuinely fine — half the weddings I photograph have a fixed church slot at one o’clock. Open shade, a doorway, the north side of a building: there is always somewhere. But if you have the choice, choose the light.
