Pictures after the ceremony, advice?

JShu11

My fiance doesn't want to see me before the wedding, which is fine, but that means we'll have to take all of our pictures and family pictures after the ceremony. I'm sure a lot of people do this, but I hate the idea of making our guests wait. I don't want there to be a huge gap between the ceremony and the reception. we are doing a cocktail hour, but i still feel bad! can anyone tell me if they did this and how they entertained their guests?

~mRm~

We did this. We made a timeline and stuck to it.
For example:
Ceremony 2pm - 3pm
Cocktail hour started at 3:45 (venue was roughly 30 minutes from church).
Bridal party introduced at 5pm

We had roughly 2 hours to obtain all the photos we needed at church and a second location before being introduced at the reception. Our second location was on the way to our reception venue so that worked out well. We also made sure our photographer knew our "must have" shots so everything went very smoothly during our allotted time.

fallbride1109

Go ahead and at least do some family pics beforehand--you with your parents, him with his parents, etc.  This will at least cut down some of the time after the reception.

LauraT25

Ditto stephiehall - you can still do a lot of family and bridal party pictures beforehand.  Most of our family portraits don't contain both of us, and then there are a handful with both of us, and a couple of both families together.  We also have a lot of more candid shots with our family during the reception, and if I had been super worried about time I would have been fine just doing the formals separately and getting the rest as candids.

SJBNJB

You can talk to your photographer about it....they will have had a lot of experience in that area and should be able to give you some ideas.  Honestly, it doesn't save a whole lot of time to do family photos twice, as stepping the bride/groom in and out of a photo is way quicker than gathering the family and setting them up two times.  No matter how organized you think you may be, people don't always follow directions and some people may thing they don't have to stick around after the ceremony since they already did some photos earlier.   Individual photos and bridal party photos are great to do beforehand, and the cocktail hour should not only be entertainment enough for your guests, but enough time for the photographer to do family shots (as long as you don't ge too carried away with every single possible combination imaginable) and shots of the two of you.  Again, I'd talk with your photographer and see what they've experienced.