Wedding Tip Wednesday | Choosing the Perfect Getting Ready Room

WEddings

When planning your wedding day, there are an overabundance of details to consider. Pastel pink or dusty blue? Loose bouquet or tight and structured? Indoor or outdoor ceremony? We think that the time leading up to your wedding should be fun and a moment to reconnect with the love of your life, making memories with your best friend.. not googling for hours on end. So we bring to you: Wedding Tip Wednesday. A series where we share all of our personal expert opinions on making your day the most magical ever.

Part 1:  Dressing for Your Engagement Session

Part 2. First Look or no First Look?

Part 3: 5 Reasons We Love Long Veils

Part 4: Choosing the perfect Getting Ready Room

Part 5. Indoors versus Outdoor Spaces

One of the things that makes our images show-stopper is the way that we strategically choose locations and use light in order to make our clients look their absolute best. So when our clients ask us what makes for the best getting ready locations.. our answer is actually a whole lot simpler than you might think…

1. Start with the light.

It comes as no surprise that we would say that choosing a room with lots of beautiful natural light is the best starting point. And when we say lots of light- we mean it! Look for large windows (and lots of them!) that are allowing lots of gorgeous natural light to pour into the room. This allows us to being the outdoors into where you are.

But what might surprise you is that it isn’t the only place we recommend starting. For example, if your venue or getting ready location is tight quarters, try to choose a getting ready location that has quick access to a beautiful outdoors location! This will allow for us to bring you outside for some of those gorgeous editorial getting ready photos that you will want to spam all over Facebook and in your wedding album.

2. Look for the “Cleanest” Room Possible

Pictures? Odd lamps? Plugs? Tourist Guide Books? Yep.. you can bet money on the fact that we will move all of those things out of the way if they are in your getting ready room (that is.. if they aren’t bolted to the walls!) Why? Because girl- this is your wedding day, and we want you to be the focal point of your wedding day pictures, so whenever possible, you can feel guaranteed that we are going to make sure that the background is as distraction free as possible. So where do you come in?

Well, when choosing your getting ready location, we always highly recommend to our brides that they try to find rooms that are as clean, elegant, and distraction free as possible. (Yes- we’re looking at you oddly patterned hotel room walls!) Extra bonus points if you can find a room that meets the “holy grail” qualification: white and lots of natural light.

3. Think outside of the box!

Some of our favorite getting ready rooms have been from airbnb! Not only does it add a creative element to your wedding day, but we find that our couples who have utilized the gorgeous mansions on air bob save money on the hotel room all while having some of the most elegant, absolutely stunning getting ready locations that we have ever seen! Still considering a hotel? We recommend upgrading to a suite (or you can be like our bride Maria and just go all out and book the presidential suite!)

So often a hotel room that looks big often becomes very cramped in a matter of minutes on a wedding day.

Think- you, your bridesmaids, mom(s), hair and makeup artists (plus their tables and palettes), videographer(s)… then add us in the mix, and that room with two queen beds quickly feels like a clown car adorning some of the industry’s best professionals- so when we say go for the suite, we promise you it will be worth every penny when your big day rolls around.

4. Remember Your Groom!

So if you totally forgot about this… don’t worry, we won’t tell your #jordonleegroom on you! But as we tell all of our grooms in our consultation, as long as their groomsmen are all there, on time, and ready to roll in a clean room, we can make magic happen- and fast. So when choosing your grooms room, we recommend keeping all of these tips in mind. But our biggest tip for your groom is short and to the point… get ready on the same property!

Not only will this save you two tons of time and confusion on your wedding day by avoiding extra transportation, but it also just makes the day so much more relaxed, fun, and organized. Your wedding timeline always begins when your photographers arrive at the first location, so an additional minutes of travel means less minutes of photographing those memories from your wedding day.

Our favorite part of getting ready at one location? Not only does it mean that it is less stress, but it also means that means you get more pictures in your gallery!)

 

Be sure to follow along our series for more wedding day tips as we continue our series! Have something that you would love for us to cover in the series? Drop a comment below and we will add it to the list!

All our love,

Shauna and Jordon

More from the Blog

Destination fine art wedding photographers documenting love worldwide.