How To Personalise Your Wedding Day.
Welcome to this month’s blog here at Espey Photography! This month I wanted to talk about personalised wedding days. As a relaxed wedding photographer from the Buckinghamshire area, I am huge fan of when couples take the opportunity to personalise their wedding day. I’m a huge lover in detail and photographing the little thing that were authentic to your wedding day and who you are as a couple.
With that in mind I wanted to share my favourite and easy ways you can make your wedding day more personalised and let your personality shine through!
Table Names
The simple choice is numbering your tables; 1,2,3,ect. Some venues have signs available or there easy to find on the internet. But if like me you think, nope that’s a missed opportunity for some fun you could name your tables after something particular like holiday locations or favourite albums. The joy with this is it’s a chance to express a bit of your personality to your guests, use personal photos and create a funky seating chart.
Example ideas include:
Fandom locations; e.g. Hogwarts, Endor, Hobbiton, Narnia…
Stages of a particular festival, We had our table named after Glastonbury stages where we got engaged.
Favourite’s like Albums, Bands, Films, Musicals, Books,
If you do go for numbers think about using a photo of you and your partner at those ages. This creates a fund talking point for your guests!
Past holidays with accompanying photos or flags.
The Cake
Let me start by saying that I am not anti a traditional wedding cake. I find what cake makers can do incredible! But if sugar flowers or a semi naked cake is not your thing then it is not the only option.
If you still want to go down the 1 cake route you could add a detail that’s more particular to your character; like last year I was at a wedding and instead of sugar flowers they had iconic Star Wars refences like a Death star and R2-D2 made of icing. From a distance it looked like a normal cake but up close- wow! Other ideas could be including your pet in icing, having a colourful cake, or playing around with your topper, like having Lego figures!
The other alternative to a single traditional cake is choosing something that speaks more to your taste; Cheese, doughnuts, cupcakes, cookies/brownies, pie, pizza, champagne tower… Let’s be honest, if cake isn’t your thing there is no law saying you have to have one! So, have a think to yourself- what do I want? Then go for that!
Celebrant vs Registrar
So normally with non-religious weddings you book a registrar from your venue’s local council, they will come, have a brief 15 minuet meeting with each half of the couple and then they will preform the service as dictated by law. The majority I’ve met so far are nice and do a good job. But the one thing about these ceremony’s is that they are very impersonal and most people find them quite dry. A great alternative to this is celebrants! They are wedding fairy-god-people who conduct your service on your behalf and unlike council appointed registrar’s they generally meet you a few times before your big day to find out everything about you and what makes you tick as a couple, then they go away and using the information you’ve shared with you will tailor the service to you. I’ve been to a couple of wedding’s done this way and I love how the celebrant take the time to tell the couples story and the way they can inject couple specific humour into the proceedings. There’s a lot of different people out there offering this service so if it’s of interest to you have a look around!
Small disclaimer- Celebrant’s in England/Wales can’t legally marry you so you have to take care of the paperwork at your local council office. But it’s a small price to pay to avoid a standard service.
Ceremony Reading
Whether you go with a celebrant or a registrar, your ceremony is a great place to personalise your wedding. The wedding ceremony can be viewed as the boring ‘legal’ bit of the day- ‘get this over with and we can have fun’ which I often think is really sad, as your wedding day it should be the most memorable part of your day! One way you can do this is by choosing a reading that means something to you instead of something generic about marriage, at a recent wedding I second shot at the brother of the Groom read from the Hobbit then gifted the couple a beautiful copy of the book!
You could use your favourite or childhood books, written wisdom given from a family member, Lyrics of your favourite song (I’ve heard of people using John Cooper Clark’s ‘I wanna be yours’ which is now best known as a Arctic Monkey’s song), Poem’s, or even a monologue from a film.
Music Choices
I could talk about music choices in weddings for ever! Music is something that is so personal and really shows a lot about a person’s character by the music they listen to. When we were getting married James and I took a lot of time choosing what music we wanted to at each part of our wedding and there’s lots of opportunities to insert your favourite songs-
Pre ceremony, as guests get seated.
Walking down the aisle- Favourite song? Or I have even heard people using the juristic park theme and Star Wars score.
Signing of the registrar- maybe something softer that works as good background music.
Walking back up the aisle as a couple- personally I would choose something with a bit of joy and celebration!
Drinks reception- we put together a list of all our favourite songs that had a love theme.
Walking into the meal when you’re announce- this isn’t a must but we had a bit of fun with this and had ‘I could be so good for you’ which got a lot of laughs
During your meal- I’ve been to a wedding where the couple were inspired by Bridgerton’s use of modern songs in a string quartet style and played a playlist of similar covers- brilliant!
First Dance- traditionally is reserved for ‘The couples song’ but if your song doesn’t suit the normal slow dance style don’t let that stop you.
Evening music- obviously you can go Band, you can have a DJ but either way the music does not have to be typical, middle of the road cheese! There are some songs I am sick to the back teeth of because the same 5 songs are always played after the first dance! My favourite evening music moment at a wedding has been one couple that had about an hour of pop punk classics and it was by far the busiest their dance floor was all night! Brief your DJ to play you and your guests style of music!
To add an extra ‘bit of spice’ consider hiring someone to sing and play your song choices perhaps on an acoustic guitar or piano to give those songs a special touch.
Flower Choices
Most people go for flowers at their wedding and often their choices are informed by their colour scheme but if you wanted you could use your floral selection as a chance to personalise your wedding day. You could choose flowers that family members had previously had at their wedding or use birth month flowers to represent certain family members, these could work as a nice tribute if someone can’t be with you on your day. Another idea, you could use flowers referenced in your favourite media like roses in the Hunger games or Beauty and the beast. I accidently had a Harry Potter refence in my arrangements. When choosing our flowers, I gave Bloomfield Flowers a mood board of flowers and asked for something similar. I didn’t give it much thought until on the day I looked down and there was a Leucospermum Nutan sitting in my bouquet, which just so happened to be the same as the flower that can be seen on Hagrid’s Lapel in the Goblet of Fire film.
