2 huge reasons why
I am a huge advocate for having an unplugged wedding! If you haven’t heard of this then it’s by time you had. An unplugged wedding is when the bride & groom limit the use of cellphones and cameras during their ceremony making the photographers the only people photographing the ceremony. There’s a few reasons we are huge advocates of it below:
1. be present
Your guests will be able to see you walking down the aisle towards your groom. They’ll be present and in the moment allowing them to smile with you, laugh with you and even cry with you. It’s the most joyful day of your life and you want them to be present during the ceremony. No one will be offended. They don’t need that shot for Instagram. Would you rather see your guest’s faces or 200 cellphones pointing your direction? I promise you won’t regret it and neither will your guests. They’ll respect your decision 100%.
This is our bride, Argelia, who deserved to have people looking at her rather than through the viewfinder of their iPhones. Imagine how this image would look without cell phones out!
2. better phototgraphs
We’ll get straight to the point here… cellphones are really distracting in photographs. Like I mentioned above, guests love photographing you coming down the aisle. I also love photographing you coming down the aisle, but sometimes, guests go too far and get in the way or I get a dozen cellphones in the aisle and it really takes away from the moment. Just compare the two photos below with the one above. Which one is less distracting? The one with less cellphones, right? We are there to capture your day and we won’t miss a single thing. Telling them to put their phone away will result in better images for you!
3. bonus reason
It stops what I like to call, Uncle Bob. He’s the uncle who has a nice camera, shoots a lot of photos and they actually turn out pretty nice… but he doesn’t have boundaries. He roams during the ceremony and will make my job more difficult and could be distracting for your guests. We appreciate his love for you and for photography. After all, he just wants to capture the memories for you. So no hard feelings Uncle Bob, but having an unplugged ceremony means that he’ll keep his camera at home or at least in his bag!
In this photo, there was a guest who insisted on getting her own photo of the bride while we were doing portraits of the bride and groom. Although it gave me a good idea for this shot, it ruined the pace of our portraits.
There you have it! 2 reasons (& a bonus) for you to have an unplugged ceremony. It’ll make my job easier and I’ll capture better images for you. Some people put a sign out at the start of the aisle, which is awesome! I would suggest taking it a step further and asking your officiant to make an announcement. I had an unplugged ceremony and it was the best because we knew that everyone had their eyes on us and they weren’t on their phones. I’ll never regret it!