With an all-star cast led by Robert DeNiro, Katherine Heigl, Diane Keaton, Amanda Seyfried, Topher Grace, with Susan Sarandon and Robin Williams, THE BIG WEDDING is an uproarious romantic comedy about a charmingly modern family trying to survive a weekend wedding celebration that has the potential to become a full blown family fiasco. To the amusement of their adult children and friends, long divorced couple Don and Ellie Griffin (De Niro and Keaton) are once again forced to play the happy couple for the sake of their adopted son’s wedding after his ultra conservative biological mother unexpectedly decides to fly halfway across the world to attend. With all of the wedding guests looking on, the Griffins are hilariously forced to confront their past, present and future – and hopefully avoid killing each other in the process. Screenplay by Justin Zackham. Directed by Justin Zackham.
THE BIG WEDDING has some of my favorite actors in it, and it sounds like a fun date night movie…. now if the whole thing happened in real life, I bet it would be a wedding photographer’s nightmare! Oh, the drama!! I thought I would take this opportunity to share some of my wedding pet-peeves from a wedding photographer’s perspective.
1. Bad Scheduling. This one is a huge pet peeve for me since most weddings seem to be scheduled right at sunset. What good is that, when the ceremony finishes and you don’t have any light left to take beautiful natural-light photos of the venue that you’re spending $10 or $20,000 on? It doesn’t make sense to me! If you don’t plan to take any beautiful photos in natural light at your venue, then why spend so much money on a fancy venue? Either schedule your ceremony MUCH earlier so that you have plenty of time for photos, or get over the antiquated tradition of not seeing each other before the wedding, and do a First Look (The first look is where the bride and groom have a special, private meeting to see each other for the first time before the ceremony, mainly to take their portraits and take advantage of the light).
2. Too many guests taking photos at the wrong time. By all means wedding guests should be able to enjoy taking pictures. But they should NOT be jumping in the middle of the aisle to take picture during the ceremony, knocking the photographer out of the way, purposely getting in front of the hired photographer so they can grab the KEY SHOT before the hired photographer, or walking around and acting like a professional photographer during the day. Especially in key moments, their flash (which is no-doubt, mounted to a professional grade camera that they just bought but do not know how to use, and have set to “Auto”), can absolutely destroy major shots. Wedding guests should be enjoying the wedding and celebrating with the happy couple, not walking around working and hoping to improve their wedding photography portfolio. That’s MY job.
3. The Bouquet Toss. Well, more specifically, what happens after the bouquet toss and the garter toss. When they have the girl who caught the bouquet sit in a chair and the guy who caught the garter is basically forced to put the garter on this poor unassuming girl with his teeth – or even just using his hands, to put it all the way up her leg, with the crowd chanting loudly that the higher it goes, the more successful years of marriage the couple will have. I’ve seen this several times and it is incredibly embarrassing to me. I can’t imagine being the girl who caught the bouquet and then being forced to do that, not realizing what she was getting into. I’m pretty sure I would just get disgusted and walk away, ruining the whole moment. I keep waiting to see someone do that, but it never happens. Typically the bouquet catcher sits there absolutely mortified just waiting for it all to end!
Make sure you go see THE BIG WEDDING on April 26th!! Do you have any wedding pet peeves, whether you are a wedding guest, a bride/groom, or a fellow wedding vendor?