We’ve all been there. You’re an hour behind the timeline because of any number of wedding emergencies that seem to strike, only 20 minutes of daylight left, and the kind of frantic energy running through your veins that can only be felt on a wedding day during golden hour. WHY did you have that second cup of coffee this morning?!
We’ve felt that panic set in, and know that it can be so crippling you can’t seem to think of anything. You’re drawing a total blank. Your eyes are suddenly incapable of seeing the best light and your mind can’t seem to come up with any pose other than bad prom. (And you reaaaaaalllly don’t want to go there). In an instant you can envision how the whole day is going to spiral downhill from there and you’re going to disappoint your couple and your whole business is going to crash and burn and WHY did you even wear these stupid shoes because your feet HURT. To you, and our past selves when we used to have these moments early in our career, we say BREATHE. And more importantly, have a system in place for when moments like these happen. Because in the world of weddings, it’s not a question of IF you’ll have days like this, it’s a question of WHEN.
So we decided there had to be a better way than letting situations like this intimidate us. We knew that if we had a plan of action to implement every time a planner told us there where only 15 minutes for portraits we wouldn’t panic. Panic and anxiety aren’t exactly conductors for us creating our best work, so we developed a system to work through when we found ourselves pressed for time. It’s not so cleverly called the 3-3-3.
In a nutshell, the 3-3-3 stands for 3 different poses that we will shoot in 3 different locations at 3 different crops. We’ll find our first spot of good light (and ideally a good background but you know we always value that second) and pose our subject. We will then shoot portrait and landscape images at 3 different crops (full length, waist up and tight) before moving on to repeat this two more times in two different locations. Sometimes, if we’re even more pressed for time, we won’t move out of the pocket of light we’ve got working for us and will simply change the poses or angle we’re shooting from. By working through this we know that no matter what we will have 18 different portraits in our back pocket in a relatively short amount of time. We feel ready to drop a mic because we just made wedding day miracles happen, and created a set of diverse images in no time flat. Which obviously means we deserve some cake ; )
Hope this is helpful to you in the middle of your next time crunch, and if it is let us know! And as always we love when you inspire our upcoming education posts, so reach out to us on social media or through a comment below if there’s a topic you’d like to see up next! Happy shooting friends!
Love + Laughs,
Sarah & Ben
