Unplugged Wedding – Why You Might Want to Consider It

A term I’ve been hearing quite a bit lately, and I’m sure you have as well during the course of your wedding planning, is the “unplugged wedding”.  What is an unplugged wedding?  It is where you kindly ask your guests to turn off and put away their electronic devices and enjoy the wedding day with you, letting your photographer and videographer (if you have one) capture the day, or at minimum, the ceremony without any distractions or interruptions.   I’ve been pretty lucky so far, but the more weddings I shoot, the more I’m starting to encounter guests, usually unknowingly, sometimes purposely getting in the way of photos.

With the boom of affordable digital cameras including DSLRs, as well as phones with better cameras, and even tablets, many people are bringing these with them to weddings to capture their own pictures.  While we don’t have a problem with guests taking some shots throughout the day, an issue that many photographers are now encountering is wedding guests jumping in front of us to get the shot that we need to get, or putting their tablet or phone right in our line of sight and ruining a photo.  Most times we have one chance to catch the bride coming down the aisle or the first kiss that lasts only a few seconds.  Then we check our pictures and cry inside because a guest’s giant iPad is covering the bride’s face.  We can do a lot of things in post processing but there isn’t much we can do to rescue that important photo.

Another issue is the flashes from other cameras.  When we take a picture, we have it exposed for our lighting conditions, and that may be natural light or it can include our own flashes or lighting equipment.  The flashes from guest’s cameras will blow out pictures we take beyond any point of recovery.  As  professionals, we can sometimes rescue a photo that is less than perfect, but when a photo is way overexposed due to multiple flashes, all of that information is lost and there’s no chance at fixing it.  I’ve actually come across a Craigslist ad where a bride was asking for help fixing their overexposed wedding photos that their uncle took (another reason to hire a pro).  Once a picture is severely under or overexposed, it is usually not fixable.  After all we are artists, not magicians!

Now that you’ve decided on an unplugged wedding, how do you let your guests know in a clever yet polite way?  You can ask your officiant to make an announcement at the beginning of the ceremony (see the video below), and/or create some signs that guests see on their way in, or you could even include a line or two in your program if you have one.  It can’t hurt to go with both a sign and an announcement, since not everyone will read a sign or the program.  I don’t have any images of signs to share, but if you do a simple search in Google or on Pinterest, you’ll find  a lot of great ideas!

This video is from our friends at Joseph Testa Films who were gracious enough to share this clip with us, of an officiant making an announcement for guests to take some photos, then put their cameras and phones away for the rest of the ceremony.  Here’s the direct link: http://vimeo.com/75032317