Rain Site for Wedding Photography in Central/Northern NJ

jaborzumato90

My fiance and I are getting married in June and unfortunately we cannot go to our venue, the Westmount Country Club,  until a half hour before our wedding begins because there is a bar miztvah before our wedding.  Even if it rains we wouldn't be able to go there for pictures and have been searching for indoor locations with no luck.  Does anybody have any indoor places they know pictures can be taken.  Maybe places in Fairleigh Dickinson campus or Seton Hall or Montclair.  

Any help would be much appreciated!

Gordo2014

I wa going to suggest college campuses as I went to FDU in Madison and it's beautiful there; that's where we went for our engagement portraits. However, I do recall there was quite a process to get the permits to take those photos.  And that's with me as alumnist.  So be prepared for that.

Jeannine12

@gordo2014 I went to school at FDU also.  Do you mind sending me a private message and explaining the permits and all that you had to go through for pictures on campus?  We are looking at places for our engagement session and that is one of our top 3 places.  Thank you

bride2b101015

I think you might be able to get a permit for the inside of Kip's Castle. That's about 10 min from Westmount CC. 

ohmrs2014

It rained on our wedding day, and I tried so hard to find a place the day before to take outside photos.  I couldn't find anything like what we were originally going to do.  We just took the photos in the hotel where we were getting ready.  Not ideal, but it worked.

Gordo2014

I received no less than three privte messages asking about my earlier comment re: needing to get a permit to shoot at FDU (and I imagine most university campuses).  At the risk of hijacking this thread, let me post this publically as there really is nothing private about it:

 

In the end, I can't offer much in the way of insight, re: getting permits to photograph at FDU as my photographer (Robert Wayne Photography) really took care of that for us (turns out he was also a graduate of FDU-Madison). He called into the school, got passed around a half dozen times, finally found the right person (I think it was someone who headed up meetings and conferences at the school, but I don't know their name), forms were faxed back and forth, and he had to provide a certificate of insurance before getting final approval.

Make sure your photographer has liability insurance; not all of them do and FDU will definitely not be permit a photographer to shoot there if they don't.

Scheduling was another challenge as it could not be done on any weekend morning when they had another event of any kind and it seemed like there was always something going on. It helped that we were willing to do our shoot on a Sunday. Finally, we all met just outside the guard house. He was given a form to present to the guard and we were off. So a bit of a process, but we were glad we did it. Good luck.