From the Wedding Tip Series, providing a new piece of advice every Wednesday to help brides get the most out of their wedding photography. This Wednesday, we are proud to unveil tip eight:

“Feed Your Photographer(s)”

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that your vendors are people and not machines, but treating them as you would any of your invited guests can really go a long way toward keeping them happy and working their hardest for you on the wedding day.

If you have hired your photographer for six hours or more, you should be providing them with a meal, ideally it will be the same meal that you are offering to your guests. A seat in the dining room is also appreciated, as this allows us to be present in case anything particularly photo-worthy happens while we are eating.

As a photographer, there is nothing worse than bending over backwards all day for a client, and then when the delicious-looking meals come out, having to go hunting for a Wonderbread-and-Bologna sandwich somewhere in the back cattle bin. No one comes to even get us to tell us where it is, and most of the time the meal is so foul it’s not even worth taking time out of our day to go looking for it. And then, sometimes, there isn’t even a meal to be found at all.

If you are still thinking of going the vendor-meal route, you should also be checking your vendors’ contracts to make sure they don’t specify that the meal be the same as the ones provided to the guests, which mine does. When no meal or a vendor meal is provided, I maintain the right for myself and my team to leave your venue for one hour to obtain a hot meal. I have never exercised this right, but I’ll admit it’s been tempting when I was either provided no meal or a dry, unappetizing one. If you think about what you pay for an hour of coverage, versus an additional guest meal or two, unless your meals are $300 a plate, it also makes more financial sense for you to have us sit and eat quickly in the dining room for 15 minutes versus leave your venue for an hour all together.

This tip really applies to ANY of your vendors; your planner, your D.J. your videographer, etc. Every single one of them will appreciate being treated as one of your guests. And when you need one of them to stay 15 minutes later because things ran behind, or go above and beyond for you on something down the road, I guarantee they’ll remember the way they were treated at your wedding 😉