Get inspired using these creative tips from planning to the honeymoon phase.
If you love photos, old and new, how about incorporating them as part of your wedding celebration? It’s a great way to share your lives, bringing a sentimental element as well as giving your friends and new families a chance to really get to know you both.
Engagement Party
A great idea for your engagement party! Search through your old photo albums for photos of you before you met each other or during your early days of dating through to now. Get photos from your fiance’s mother or from friends and other family. Make a slideshow presentation, add a couple of your favourite songs and play it during your party.
Bridal Shower with Pictures
Start making memories before the wedding begins with a photo-themed bridal shower. Have the shower hostess ask everyone to bring a photo-related gift. The presents might be a memory-making object like a camera or video camera or a memory-keeping object such as a picture frame or photo album; or a ready-made memory, such as a collage of photos of you and your friends from high school or a framed picture of you and your fiancé. If most of your guests have been friends for years, you could show a slide show of your shared past during the party. And remember to have a friend or relative on hand to take pictures of your bridal shower – you’ll definitey be wanting plenty of those!
Hen’s Party Glamour Style
Take your hen’s party to a photo studio for a glamorous set of photos that you’ll keep long after the wedding. And if you still want to do the more traditional night out at the bars afterward, you’ll be made-up and all ready to go!
Visual Invitations
Rather than ordering standard engraved invitations, why not incorporate some of your own great art? Uncover that fabulous drawing of a bride and groom you did when you were five and do your invitations on copies of it. Unearth that letter you wrote when you were eight, vowing to never kiss a boy (except your dad), and reprint that along with a picture of the two of you. Or, head to an old-school black-and-white photo booth and create a fun photo strip for your save-the-date notices! Or you could use photos from your engagement photo shoot.
Young Movie Stars
If your parents took movies while you were growing up, you could create your own video of the two of you as babies and toddlers. Put it on a loop and let it run silently in a corner throughout your reception. Your guests will get to know you even better and it’s a great conversation piece!
Bride and Groom Poster Size
At the wedding, have childhood photos of each of you blown up into poster-size prints and mounted on stiff cardboard sheets or a foam-core board. Ask all your guests to sign the poster before they leave the reception. After the wedding, take your posters back home and hang them on the wall next to each other.
Get creative using old and new photos in your wedding celebrations!
Theme Shots
Why not give your guests some instant memories too? Hire a photographer with old-fashioned costumes and a backdrop for fun wedding photos. Guests can don the costumes and pose in a Wild West saloon, an old-fashioned milk bar or a Victorian parlour — it could even match the theme of your wedding. The photographer can give your guests prints to take home. You can even have individual cardboard frames printed with your names and the date of your wedding to slip them into. Another, simpler option is to rent or make one of those stand-up flats with the bodies of famous people or cartoon characters painted on the front. Guests stick their own heads on top of the fake bodies (or stand next to the famous figure). Have someone on hand with a Polaroid, or just let guests use their own cameras.
Picture This
Use small picture frames as name card holders. Slide the guests’ escort cards into the frames and line up all the frames the way you would ordinary escort cards. Guests will take the frame with them to find their tables and then take them home at the end of the night. Choose silver frames or pressed paper, cardboard-backed frames.
Through the Generations
Display your parents’ and grandparents’ wedding photos on the entry or the cake tables, creating a sense of history at your wedding and honouring family at the same time.
Scatter Shots
Help your friends and families get to know each other through a visual history of your lives. Scatter handfuls of both your families’ photos on each table (or assemble a collection on a big table in a central location, where everyone will be able to see it), along with a card offering short explanations of the scenes. Sharing your photos can help create the feeling of a shared past, something your families will appreciate, particularly if they don’t know each other well yet.
Share the Shooting
Put a few disposable cameras on each table and ask guests to take pictures of anything that seems interesting, or give them a special scanvenger hunt with images to find (bride and groom kissing, cake cutting etc). When you develop the film later, you’ll be surprised by what you find.
Favour Them with Frames
Give picture frames as gifts to your guests (or bombonieres). Find unique old frames at antique stores or buy matching, elegant silver ones. Or choose simple frames and decorate them yourself with ribbon, glitter or a mosaic of old, cut-up photos. In the frames? If you can dig them up (and are having a small celebration), put a photo of you or your fiancé with each guest in them, so every guest’s gift includes a picture of them and you!
Start an Anniversary Album
Decide now to take photos on every anniversary and keep them all together in one anniversary album. Start with pictures of your wedding. Each year, add a shot of the two of you that depicts the changes in your lives — your new house, your new car, your new babies. When your children get married, they’ll have plenty of old photos right in the album to use for their own wedding!