A wedding shot list template, worked through

A wedding is a running order before it is a list

Most of a shot list is yours to sequence. A wedding is not: the ceremony starts when the registrar or the officiant says it starts, and everything else on the day is either before it or after it. So the groups below are the parts of the day in the order they happen, and the value of writing them down is that you can see what has to finish before the ceremony and what has room to move after it.

Two sections are worth more attention than the rest. Family groups over-run on almost every wedding where they were not written down beforehand, because the list is being assembled out loud while thirty people stand about — one row per grouping, agreed with the couple in advance, is the whole fix. And the couple portraits are the only group whose time is decided by the sun rather than by you.

Photograph the details before the day starts moving

The rings, the stationery, the empty ceremony room and the dressed reception room are all rows that stop being possible the moment people arrive. They sit at the top of their groups for that reason, and they are marked must-have so that a morning running forty minutes late takes something else instead.

Anchor the portraits and let the day fall around them

Golden hour on a wedding is a fixed window that moves by a minute or two a day and by an hour or more across a season, and a July wedding in Scotland puts it long after the speeches. Pin the backlit portrait to that window and the running order is worked out around it, rather than the portraits being the thing that gets cut when the cake is late. Planning a shoot around golden hour works through a whole day built that way, and the schedule computes the window from the venue’s coordinates and the date.

What the couple gets, and what the crew gets

The same list answers both. Read the group column top to bottom and it is the day in order, which is the version a second photographer works from. Read the tag column sideways — Details, Family, Portraits, Reception — and it is the delivery cut, without a row moving. Groups and tags are not the same thing, and a wedding is where the difference shows up most.

The family group list is also the one page somebody else has to read on the day. It goes on the call sheet along with the call times, so the person calling names forward is working from the same list you are.