We know all too well how crazy family photos can be so over the last 12 years we have developed a system which gets everyone’s photos done in 20mins. This will avoid the family photo chaos. The worst thing to see is a couple getting stressed out during family photos and trying to wrangle family members themselves. It stresses you, as the couple and it also stress out family members. And we highly suggest throwing away the shot list of individual names of family members. The shot list forces you to feel stuck, frustrated and overwhelmed if one family member is no where to be found. 

The easiest, quickest and cleanest way to document family photos that we have fine tuned over the years is what we call the Slim Down Approach. This helps you to avoid the family photo chaos.

Slim Down Approach to Avoid Family Photo Chaos

• We begin family photos by bringing up the brides entire full family all the way out to cousins – both sides. 
• We then document that full family photo.
• Next, If your mothers side of the family is very large and your fathers side of the family is also very large them we will break it up into the two families for photos are proceed as below.  
• If both sides are small them we will continue slimming down from the original large couple family photo. 
  

Slim Down Approach works like this. 

• After we take the large group full family photo we will ask cousins to step out. 
• This will leave us with the full family all the way out to aunts and uncles. 
• We will then remove aunts and uncles. They are released to the reception.  We are then left with family out to your nieces and nephews. 
• Following this photos nieces and nephews will sit down and we have your basic immediate family photo.
• We will then remove siblings and do a photo with you both, your parents and grand parents. 
• Then we remove your parents and have just a grand parents photo. 
• We then bring in the grand kids (AKA your cousins) and do a photo with your grand parents and all the grand kids.
• We them release the grandparents to the reception and do a cousins photo.
• Then your cousins can head to the reception. 
• Siblings on the brides side then come up for a siblings photo and as long as they are not in the wedding party then they are released to the reception along with your nieces and nephews.
• The brides parents them come back up for a photo with the two of you.
• We then ask the grooms parents to step in so we have a photo with the two of you and both sets of parents. 
• Following this the brides parents are released to the reception and we take a photo with just the two of you and the grooms parents. 

Rinse & Repeat

We then repeat the entire process starting with the grooms full family photo. Then slimming down in the same fashion. This ensures we have photos of everyone in the family documented in groups. This makes it easy for family to follow along and not get lost. It also takes away the need for a shot list. 

For additional smaller and individual family photos we recommend doing those during the reception. This way there is time for all the other photos needed the day of after the ceremony.

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