How to Actually Enjoy Your Wedding Day : Tips from a Documentary Wedding Photographer in Toronto

Here's something I've noticed after photographing several hundred weddings over more than twenty years.

The brides who enjoy their day the most aren't the ones with the most elaborate schedules, or the biggest floral budgets, or the most Pinterest-worthy venues.

They're the ones who made a decision — early on — that the day was going to be for them.

That sounds obvious. But you'd be surprised how many people spend the entire day performing it instead of living it.

It’s all about you, and not about you at the same time.

The moment you start thinking about being photographed, you've already lost something.

I say this as the person holding the camera.

When you catch yourself wondering "is he getting this?" or adjusting your posture because you noticed me across the room — that moment, that real thing that was happening a second ago, is gone.

I've watched it happen hundreds of times. A genuine laugh interrupted the second someone becomes aware of the camera. A real conversation that stops mid-sentence because a bride suddenly remembers she's supposed to look a certain way.

The best photographs I've ever made — the ones couples actually print, actually hang on walls, actually email me about three years later — are the ones where the person in the frame had completely forgotten I was there.

My job is to make that easy for you. But you have to meet me halfway.

Don't Schedule "Photo session at a park." Seriously.

I've written about this before and I'll keep writing about it until people stop doing it.

The hours-long park session after the ceremony. The bridal party lineup in the heat. The "okay, everyone smile" moments that pull you away from your guests, your family, your own experience of the day.

Why is this still a thing?

Nobody ever looks back at those photographs and feels something. They're fine. They're technically competent. They look like every other wedding that photographer just shot. And they cost you two hours of your own party to produce.

A few quick photographs together — you two, your people, your family — absolutely. That takes twenty minutes if everyone's in the same room. It doesn't need to be a production.

The moments that get downloaded over and over again are never from the "photo time" block. They're from the ceremony. The reception. The quiet moment between you and your mother when no one else was watching. The first time you saw your partner that morning. The speech that made your grandmother cry.

None of those needed to be scheduled. They just needed someone paying attention.

Tell Your Photographer to Back Off

If you've hired someone who works the way I work — observationally, quietly — you won't need to say this. They already know.

But if your photographer tends toward the "okay, look at each other, now look at me, perfect, one more!" style of working, you're going to need to have a conversation before the wedding day.

You're allowed to say: I don't want to be directed. I don't want to be posed. I want you to photograph what's actually happening.

And if they can't do that — if they don't know how to work without controlling the scene — then they're not the right photographer for the kind of day you're trying to have.

This is not a small thing. Who you bring into that space matters. A photographer who makes the day about the photography is a problem. A photographer who disappears into it is an asset.

The Family Portrait Situation

Look, I understand why family portraits exist. Parents want them. There's a specific grandmother who needs proof she was there.

Fine. Do them. But do them fast, do them at the reception, and do not let them become the event within the event.

Here's how it goes sideways: the couple disappears for ninety minutes after the ceremony, dragging their bridal party through a park in July, and by the time they get to the reception their guests have been waiting at cocktail hour for so long the vibe has shifted. The couple walks into a room full of people who've been standing around eating cheese for two hours.

You've been to that wedding. You've seen it happen.

The solution isn't complicated. Be at your own party. Let someone who knows how to photograph people in real situations handle the rest.

What the Photos You'll Actually Love Look Like

After more than two decades of photographing weddings in Toronto and across Ontario, I can tell you with some certainty what gets kept and what gets ignored.

It's not the posed stuff. It's the look on your partner's face when you walked toward them. It's your dad's expression during the first dance — the one he didn't know I was watching. It's the two of you, completely alone in a crowded room for about fifteen seconds, laughing at something only the two of you understood.

Those images are evidence of what actually happened. They're proof that it was real.

That's what documentary wedding photography is, at its best. Not a performance of a wedding, documented. An actual wedding, witnessed.

A Few Practical Things That Make a Real Difference

Stay in one place. The weddings I find most rewarding to photograph — and the ones that produce the strongest work — are those where the day unfolds within a single venue. No bus rides between locations. No rush from ceremony to park to reception. Just the day, as it happens, where it happens. The intimacy of that is visible in the photographs.

Let your guests actually be guests. If you've invited people to your wedding, let them be present for it. The more you remove from the day — the unnecessary formalities, the scheduled photo blocks, the performances — the more present everyone gets. And presence is where the photographs come from.

Don't brief me on every moment. I've heard it a lot: "Make sure you get the cake cutting, and the bouquet toss, and the first look, and—" I understand. But the moments you can't anticipate are the ones I'm most interested in. The ones on the list will get photographed. The ones I'm looking for are the ones nobody planned.

Trust the process. You hired a professional for a reason. Let them work. If they're the right person for the job, they already know what they're doing. If they need constant instruction to function, see the earlier point about having that conversation first.

The Simplest Version of All of This

Your wedding day is yours.

Not the photographer's. Not your parents'. Not the venue coordinator's. Not Pinterest's.

Yours.

The photographs should reflect the day you actually had, not the one you curated for an audience. And the best way to make sure of that is to spend the day being in it — fully, without one eye on how it looks — and let someone who knows what they're doing take care of the record.

That's the whole thing.

Everything else is noise.

Andreas Avdoulos is a Toronto documentary wedding photographer who has been photographing weddings across Southern Ontario, Canada and internationally since 2003. He photographs intimate, candid weddings where the focus is on people, not production.