By Everyone loves a candid photo at a wedding reception, especially the bride and groom who get to have the joy of sorting through and laughing at the special moments from their big day.
But as wedding season reaches full intensity, you may find yourself in the same situations and making the same poses, at reception after reception.
Make your wedding one of the most memorable events your guests will attend this year, with these creative ways to capture moments, record video footage and collect hilarious photos together in one place.
#hashtags
Use a hashtag so all of your guests’ pictures can be seen in one place using Instagram, Twitter or another social platform. Creative hashtags which mean something to the bride and groom are a favourable option, and you can even live tweet the wedding so those who couldn’t attend don’t miss out.
Photo sharing apps are freely available too; get all your guests to download an app where they can upload and share all their photos of your special day on their smartphones.
Price: Free
Difficulty: Easy
GoPro
GoPros are relatively cheap, easy to use and capture high quality footage at a wide angle, so there is no need to worry about framing. Super rugged and easily mountable, you can get creative about how and where you film.
With a long battery life and large recordable memory, just set the GoPro up where you want, press record, and leave it to capture all the antics of the night. James C mounted a GoPro to a Whisky bottle and passed it around to his guests which resulted in this video.
If you’ve got a chocolate fountain or candy cart, mount one there to catch guests indulging, or set one up right in front of the dance floor so you don’t miss a single move!
Price: £200+
Difficulty: Easy
Instant Polaroid camera
Preserving memories in an age where digital media has largely diluted the purpose and meaning of photographs, Polaroid cameras can really capture the moment in a way a smartphone cannot.
Set up your own photo booth, with some fancy dress and comical hats, and be sure there is plenty of film available.
Polaroids make:
- Great pictures to stick on the fridge
- Memorable keepsakes for guests
- A priceless visual guestbook where people can sign the white space of the polaroid
Price: £60+
Difficulty: Easy
Wind up, disposable cameras
Having great images taken by a professional photographer is one of the best ways to record the day. But for a more fun way of capturing the event, and a way to catch those random and spontaneous moments, give your guests wind up, disposable cameras.
They’re great value cameras you can just point and shoot, and you’ll have hours of fun looking through the photos once they’re developed. You could:
- Give them to children to keep them occupied and see the wedding through their eyes
- Place them on tables to ensure you get a picture of everyone at the reception
- Create a photo scavenger hunt, where guests have to try and capture certain moments, like the groom playing with his ring, a guest falling over on the dance floor, or a cheeky kiss between the bride and groom
- Challenge each table of guests to get the best, most extravagant photo they can think of
Price: £10+
Difficulty: Easy – Hard (depending on the challenges!)
Video Confession Booth
Take your photo booth to the next level by encouraging guests to make a video confession instead. After alcohol has been flowing, a wedding is the ideal place to get guests to share their feelings, record a special message, and confess to anything they’ve hidden from the bride or groom.
You could even challenge guests to reveal something about the married couple that their other half might not know! Either way, you’ll have hours of fun watching the recordings back, and they work great when interspersed with your professional videographer’s footage of the day.
You can hire a preassembled video booth easily enough, or you could always get creative with some cardboard, paint and a GoPro to make your own in a corner of the room!
Price: £250 – £500 (depending on if you hire or set up yourself)
Difficulty: Easy – Medium (depending on whether you create your own!)
A Canvas Story
Liven up the hallways and walls around your wedding reception, with the story that led the bride and groom to their big day. Choose your favourite images, upload them, and get them printed on some beautiful premium canvases to hang around the room.
If you’ve got some funny images printed on the canvases, get your guests to mimic them, mocking sunset kisses and holiday poses to great comedic effect!
Price: £40+
Difficulty: Easy
Drone
If you really want to make a high end video and record an experience that your guests will watch over and over again, attach a GoPro to a drone to get perspective shots usually saved for Hollywood movies.
Not only will you get a bird’s eye view of the whole wedding party, if you’ve got an experienced pilot at the controls you could get some sensational swooping shots into the reception and around all the guests. Just don’t crash into the wedding cake!
Price: £500+
Difficulty: Hard
[…] The end goal is to have a canvas that tells a beautiful story. Encourage your guests to pose for pictures around the canvas. This style is cheap and easy to implement. It can cost you about forty dollars to set the canvases up in your preferred way. Paintings depicting different stories are also great for developing a canvas story. […]