Things to Avoid When Planning Your Wedding: Honest Advice From a Wedding Photographer Who Has Seen It All

If you are in the middle of planning your wedding and you are looking for advice that goes beyond the usual generic tips about staying hydrated and enjoying every moment, you have come to the right place. As a wedding photographer who has spent years behind the camera at hundreds of weddings, I have had a front row seat to the moments that go beautifully and the moments that go sideways. And while I would never trade a single one of those experiences, there are patterns I have watched repeat themselves at wedding after wedding that are entirely avoidable with a little advance knowledge and honest preparation.

When it comes to planning your wedding, having a clear vision and timeline can make all the difference.

This post is my attempt to give you that honest preparation. Consider it a list of things I wish every couple knew before their wedding day, delivered with the genuine care of someone who wants your celebration to be as smooth, joyful, and beautiful as it possibly can be.

This guide on planning your wedding is designed to offer insights from my years of experience.

Avoid David’s Bridal for Your Wedding Dress and Bridesmaid Dresses

One of the first steps in planning your wedding is to choose the right wedding dress for the occasion.

I want to lead with this one because it comes up more consistently than almost anything else I have observed over the course of my career. In all of my years photographing weddings, I have genuinely never photographed a wedding where someone purchased their wedding dress or their bridesmaids dresses from David’s Bridal and everything went completely smoothly. Not once. The issues range from dresses arriving in the wrong color or the wrong size to quality that does not hold up the way you need it to on a day when you are wearing the garment for twelve or more hours, dancing, hugging, sitting, and moving through every possible physical scenario a human being encounters in a single day.

I understand the appeal. David’s Bridal is accessible, the price points feel manageable, and the sheer volume of options available under one roof can feel reassuring when you are overwhelmed by the scope of wedding planning. But the experience of countless brides and their wedding parties tells a consistent story, and it is not one that ends with everyone feeling confident and beautiful on the wedding day.

My strong recommendation is to visit a boutique bridal store or second hand store instead. The difference in customer service alone is significant. At a boutique bridal shop, you are working with consultants who are genuinely invested in your experience, who have the time and the expertise to help you find something that actually fits your body, your vision, and your wedding aesthetic. The quality of the garments at boutique stores tends to be meaningfully better, and the alterations process is typically handled with far more care and communication than you will experience at a large chain retailer.

Yes, boutique stores can cost more. But when you weigh that cost against the stress and heartbreak of a dress emergency on your wedding morning, the investment in a better experience is almost always worth it.

In planning your wedding, remember to prioritize comfort and style in your attire.

For bridesmaids dresses specifically, there are some wonderful options that offer both quality and value without sending your wedding party to a big box bridal chain.

Revelry is a modern bridesmaid dress shop that has built a devoted following among bridesmaids and brides for offering a wide range of colors, styles, and sizes at accessible price points with a made-to-order model that reduces the sizing and availability issues that plague mass retail.

BHLDN, which is the bridal and occasion line from Anthropologie, offers beautifully designed dresses with a romantic, fashion-forward aesthetic that photographs exceptionally well.

Birdy Grey has become increasingly popular for its straightforward sizing, inclusive approach, and affordable pricing that makes coordinating a large wedding party significantly less stressful. All three of these options give your bridesmaids a better experience from ordering through wearing, and the results on your wedding day will reflect that.

Avoid Men’s Wearhouse for Your Suits and Groomsmen Attire

If David’s Bridal is the most consistent source of dress-related wedding day stress I have witnessed, Men’s Wearhouse occupies a similar position on the menswear side of the equation. I have seen more mistakes originate from Men’s Wearhouse orders than I care to recount. Wrong sizes, wrong colors, missing pieces, and suits that bear only a passing resemblance to what was ordered are all scenarios that have played out in front of my camera more times than they should.

When planning your wedding, always check for reviews of the vendors you plan to hire.

The logistical challenge with groomsmen attire is that you are often coordinating rentals or purchases across multiple people who may be coming from different cities or states, and a large chain retailer managing that volume of orders across multiple locations is a recipe for things to slip through the cracks.

If you do choose to use Men’s Wearhouse or any suit rental service, there is one piece of advice I cannot emphasize strongly enough. When you pick up your suit or tuxedo, try absolutely everything on before you leave the store. Every single piece. The jacket, the pants, the shirt, the vest if there is one, the tie, everything. Check that the color matches what you ordered. Check that the fit is correct. Check that nothing is missing. Do this well in advance of your wedding day, not the night before and certainly not the morning of. If something is wrong, you need time to have it corrected, and that window closes very quickly as your wedding day approaches.

This single habit of trying everything on at pickup has saved countless grooms and groomsmen from the particular panic of discovering a problem at seven in the morning on the wedding day when there is nothing anyone can do about it.

For couples who want to step away from the rental model entirely, there are increasingly excellent options for purchasing well-made suits at accessible price points. Brands like Indochino, Black Tux, which offers made-to-measure suits at reasonable prices, or J. Crew & Nordstrom, which has a strong selection of wedding-appropriate suiting, can give your groomsmen something that fits properly, looks sharp, and can be worn again after the wedding. A suit that your groomsman actually owns and can wear to future events is often a more appreciated gift than a rental that has to be returned the following Monday.

There are many options available when planning your wedding to ensure everyone looks their best.

One last thing about groomsmen and grooms attire. Don’t wait to figure out how to tie your tie or bowtie the morning of the wedding. Do it before the wedding day. I have personally witnessed grooms and groomsmen try for over 30 minutes to try and tie their bowtie or tie, making everything run behind schedule and causing so much stress before the day even starts.

Do Not Skip or Rush Your Wedding Rehearsal

Part of successfully planning your wedding includes a well-organized rehearsal.

A wedding rehearsal that is treated as optional, rushed through in twenty minutes, or poorly attended by the key participants is a setup for a ceremony that feels disorganized and stressful. The rehearsal exists for important reasons, and taking it seriously pays off in ways that go well beyond just knowing where to stand. It shows on the wedding day if the rehearsal was skipped. Trust me on this one.

A good rehearsal gives your wedding party confidence in the logistics of the ceremony so that on the actual day they are not second-guessing themselves or looking around nervously for cues. It gives your officiant an opportunity to run through the flow with everyone present. It gives you and your partner a chance to practice the actual physical experience of the ceremony, including the walk down the aisle, the exchange of rings, and any readings or special moments you have incorporated, so that none of it feels completely new when you are doing it in front of everyone you love.

It also gives your photographer and videographer valuable information about the timing and flow of your ceremony that helps them position themselves correctly and anticipate the key moments. A rehearsal that has been taken seriously almost always produces a ceremony that feels more relaxed, more present, and more emotionally resonant than one where everyone is figuring it out as they go.

I personally love being there to photograph your wedding rehearsal and dinner coverage. It’s such a great way to really connect with everyone the day before the wedding. It also allows you and your fiance to get more photos with your loved ones.

During the rehearsal, you can work on any specifics related to planning your wedding.

Do Not Forget to Eat on Your Wedding Day

Eating well during the day is critical when planning your wedding.

This sounds so simple that it almost does not need to be said, and yet it needs to be said because it happens at wedding after wedding. You wake up on your wedding morning, you are immediately swept into hair and makeup and getting dressed and photographs and a hundred small logistical moments, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, eating a real meal quietly slips off the agenda. Not t mention your nerves might be causing you to not want to eat. I get it.

By the time you arrive at your reception and the caterer is serving the dinner you spent months selecting, you are so emotionally and physically depleted that you can barely eat. You feel lightheaded during your first dance. You have a headache by the time the cake is cut. And you spend the most celebratory evening of your life running on fumes when you should be running on joy.

Remember that planning your wedding involves many logistical details that can be easily overlooked.

Assign someone, your maid of honor, your mother, your wedding planner, to be specifically responsible for making sure you eat a real breakfast and have snacks available throughout the getting-ready process. Put it on the timeline if you need to. This is not a small thing. Your energy, your mood, your presence, and yes, your photographs are all affected by whether you have genuinely fueled your body for one of the longest and most emotionally intense days of your life.

Do Not Over Schedule Your Photography Timeline

As a photographer, I feel a particular responsibility to be honest about this one. Over-scheduled photography timelines are one of the most common sources of wedding day stress, and they tend to produce the opposite of their intended result. When couples try to fit every possible combination of formal portraits, every must-have location, and every creative idea into a timeline that does not have enough breathing room, what they get is a rushed, anxious experience that shows up in the photographs.

A well-timed photography timeline is essential in planning your wedding.

Great wedding photography requires a certain quality of presence and relaxation from the people being photographed. When you are constantly being moved from one spot to the next, being told you only have three minutes at this location before you need to move to the next one, and watching the clock instead of each other, the resulting images reflect that tension no matter how skilled your photographer is.

Work with your photographer to build a timeline that is realistic and has genuine buffer time built into it. Trust their experience about how long things actually take versus how long couples imagine they will take. Allow for the unexpected moments of stillness and connection that produce the most beautiful photographs of the day. And accept that you will not capture every possible shot in every possible location, and that the images you do get from a relaxed and well-paced timeline will be infinitely more beautiful than a rushed collection from an over-ambitious one.

Do Not Forget to Assign Someone to Bustle Your Dress

Assigning someone to help you with the details is key in planning your wedding effectively.

This is a small logistical detail that causes a surprisingly large amount of wedding day chaos when it is overlooked. If your wedding dress has a bustle, which most dresses with any kind of train do, someone in your wedding party needs to know specifically and practically how to do it before your wedding day arrives.

This means having your maid of honor or another designated person present at your final dress fitting, watching the seamstress demonstrate the bustle, and practicing it themselves until they can do it confidently. It sounds minor until you are standing in a reception venue hallway twenty minutes into your cocktail hour while three people crouch around your dress trying to figure out a bustle system none of them has ever seen before, and your guests are wondering where you are.

Ask your seamstress to write down or photograph the bustle instructions. Have your designated person practice it at home with the dress if possible. And remind that person on the wedding day, before the ceremony is even over, that this is their job and that you are counting on them.

Do Not Leave Vendor Payments and Tips to the Last Minute

Your wedding day is not the time to be thinking about envelopes, cash, and who gets paid what amount. Handling vendor payments and gratuities in the final hours before or during your wedding adds a layer of logistical stress to a day that already has plenty of moving parts.

Vendor payments should be organized well in advance when planning your wedding.

Prepare your vendor payment envelopes well in advance of your wedding day. Label each envelope clearly with the vendor’s name, the amount inside, and any specific instructions about when it should be delivered. Assign a specific trusted person, your wedding planner, your maid of honor, or a family member, to be responsible for distributing these envelopes at the appropriate times throughout the day. Brief that person thoroughly so they know exactly what to do and when.

Knowing that this is handled and off your plate before your wedding morning even begins is a genuinely meaningful relief, and it ensures that your vendors receive their gratuities promptly and professionally, which reflects well on you and sets a positive tone for the working relationships that will carry your day forward.

Do Not Try to Manage Everything Yourself on Your Wedding Day

Delegating tasks is vital when planning your wedding so you can enjoy the day.

This is perhaps the most important piece of advice on this entire list, and it is the one that the most naturally organized and capable people tend to struggle with the most. If you are someone who is good at managing details and making sure things are done correctly, your instinct on your wedding day will be to stay on top of everything, to check in with vendors, to troubleshoot problems as they arise, and to keep the whole operation running smoothly.

Please resist this instinct with everything you have.

Your wedding day is not a project to be managed. It is an experience to be lived. Every minute you spend coordinating logistics, chasing down a vendor who is running late, or solving a seating chart problem is a minute you are not spending being present with your partner, your family, and your friends. And those minutes are the ones that become the memories and the photographs that you will carry forward.

Delegate genuinely and completely. Hire a day-of coordinator if you do not have a full wedding planner. Brief your maid of honor and your best man on specific responsibilities. Trust your vendors to do the jobs they were hired to do. And then let go of the logistics and give yourself permission to simply be there, fully and joyfully present, for every moment of the most extraordinary day of your life.

Finally, planning your wedding should be a joyful experience, not a stressful one.

Avoid Writing Your Vows the Morning of Your Wedding

I understand the temptation, and I want you to know that before I tell you why you should resist it completely. You want your vows to feel fresh and spontaneous. You are an emotional person and you think the feeling of the day itself will inspire you in ways that sitting at your desk a week earlier simply cannot. You tell yourself that you work better under pressure, that the words will come more naturally when you are already in the energy of your wedding morning, surrounded by your people and feeling all the feelings.

But here is what actually happens when you write your vows the morning of your wedding. You wake up already behind. Hair and makeup starts earlier than you expected. Someone needs something. Your phone is blowing up with questions from vendors and family members. The getting-ready space is full of people and noise and beautiful chaos, and somewhere in the middle of all of that you are supposed to find a quiet corner and excavate the most meaningful words you have ever said to another human being.

The result is almost always vows that feel rushed, incomplete, or like a first draft that never got the editing it deserved. And the stress of trying to write them in that environment bleeds into everything around it, including your getting-ready photographs, your energy during the first look, and the emotional bandwidth you have available for the ceremony itself.

Your vows deserve better than that. And more importantly, your partner deserves better than that.

Write your vows at least a week in advance. Two weeks is even better. Give yourself the gift of time and quiet and multiple drafts. Write a first version without editing yourself, just let the words come out in whatever form they take. Then let them sit for a day or two and come back to them with fresh eyes.

Cut the parts that feel performative and keep the parts that feel true. Practice reading them out loud, not just in your head, because words that read well on the page do not always land the same way when spoken. Read them to yourself in a mirror. Time them. Make sure they sound like your voice and not like a greeting card. Share the approximate length with your partner in advance so you are reasonably matched, because a significant difference in length can feel imbalanced in the moment even when both sets of words are genuinely beautiful.

And then, when your wedding morning arrives and someone asks if you have your vows ready, you can say yes with complete confidence and turn your full attention back to enjoying the experience of getting married. Even show them the cute vow book you wrote them in!

Now, about how you deliver those vows. Please do not read them from your phone. I say this with love and with the authority of someone who has photographed hundreds of ceremonies and has seen this particular choice play out in real time. A phone screen between you and your partner during the most intimate moment of your ceremony creates a visual and emotional barrier that diminishes the experience both in person and in photographs. It looks like you are reading a text message. It pulls the attention of everyone watching away from the moment and toward the device.

And practically speaking, a phone screen that dims at an inopportune moment or a notification that pops up mid-vow is a real and avoidable risk.

A wrinkled piece of paper torn from a notebook is not much better. It communicates a lack of intention around something that deserves enormous intention, and it does not photograph well under any circumstances.

Invest in a vow book. This is one of those small details that carries a weight far beyond its price tag or its physical size. A beautiful vow book, whether it is a simple leather-bound design, something that coordinates with your wedding stationery, or a more elaborate keepsake edition, elevates your ceremony in ways that are both visible and invisible. It photographs beautifully.

The images of you holding a thoughtfully chosen vow book as you speak your promises are compositionally elegant and emotionally resonant in a way that photographs of a phone screen simply are not. It signals to everyone present that what you are about to say was prepared with care and intention. It feels ceremonial in your hands in a way that reinforces the gravity and the joy of the moment you are living through.

A vow book can serve as a beautiful keepsake from planning your wedding.

I personally love this one. But there are many more all over the internet that can best suit your vow book needs and wants.

And perhaps most importantly, it becomes a keepsake. Years from now, decades from now, you will be able to pull that vow book off a shelf and hold in your hands the actual physical object that contained the words you spoke on your wedding day. You will be able to read your partner’s handwriting. You will remember exactly how it felt to stand across from the person you love and mean every single word. A phone screenshot or a folded piece of paper simply does not carry that same weight through time. A vow book does. It is one of those small details that makes a genuinely big difference, and it is absolutely worth the investment.

One Final Thought

Ultimately, planning your wedding is about creating cherished memories.

Every single thing on this list comes from real experience, from real weddings, and from a genuine desire to see couples arrive at the end of their wedding day feeling like it was everything they hoped it would be. None of these are meant to add to your stress. They are meant to reduce it by helping you anticipate the things that catch couples off guard and giving you practical, actionable ways to prevent them.

You have put enormous love, energy, and resources into creating this celebration. You deserve a day that reflects all of that effort in the most beautiful way possible. And with a little advance planning and a willingness to learn from the experiences of the couples who came before you, that is exactly what your wedding day can be.

As you embark on planning your wedding, remember to cherish every moment.

If you are looking for a wedding photographer who will not only show up prepared to capture every beautiful moment but will also help you think through your timeline, communicate openly about what to expect, and be a calm and reassuring presence throughout your entire wedding day, I would love to connect with you. Reach out through the contact form on this page and let us start a conversation about your wedding. I cannot wait to hear about what you are planning.

I am here to help you navigate through planning your wedding and make it a memorable experience.