Most couples arrive at the planning conversation with four locations on a list. By the end of it there are two.
That is not the photographer being difficult. It is arithmetic. The portrait window on a wedding day is forty-five to ninety minutes, and a move between two separated locations in Brisbane costs twenty to thirty minutes of it. Two moves and there is no window left.
Where the time actually goes
A twelve-minute drive is never twelve minutes.
Everybody has to be gathered, which takes longer with a bridal party than with two people. Then the drive. Then parking, which on a Saturday afternoon near the river is not instant, and which for a hire car with a large bridal party is its own small event. Then the walk in, which at somewhere like Gardens Point or Mount Coot-tha is five to ten minutes each way from where you can legally stop. Then a minute or two while a photographer reads a location they have just walked into.
Twenty to thirty minutes, door to door, before a single frame. On a six-hour package that is roughly eight percent of everything you booked, spent in a car park.
The other cost is less obvious. A location gives up its best three or four compositions in the first fifteen minutes. After that you are working harder for less. Two locations at twenty-five minutes each produce more usable variety than four at eight minutes each, and the photographs from the shorter version all look slightly hurried, because they were.
The two circuits that work
Both of these are walkable end to end, which is the entire reason they work.
The city circuit. The City Botanic Gardens at Gardens Point, the riverside walkway, and the Story Bridge from the northern side. In one loop you get mature gardens, open river frontage, hard urban lines and the bridge, without moving a car. The Story Bridge itself is photographable from several positions along that stretch, and they are genuinely different from one another rather than the same shot from four metres apart: from underneath at Howard Smith Wharves, from Wilson Outlook Reserve, from Captain Burke Park on the far side, and from the walkway between them.
The heritage route. Customs House at the top of Queen Street, Old Government House, City Hall and St John's Cathedral. Sandstone, colonnades, staircases and interiors, all within the CBD. The advantage over the city circuit is that most of it is built, which means it also functions as your wet-weather answer. The constraint is that every one of these is somebody's building, so what you can do at each is a conversation with that venue rather than an assumption.
South Bank sits between the two and works as a third stop on either, with the qualification that it is one of the busiest public spaces in Queensland on a Saturday afternoon. The arbour, River Quay and the river edge all photograph well and all photograph with other people in them. GOMA and the cultural precinct are the same proposition: good architecture, public access, and rules that belong to the institution rather than to you. Ask first.
For which individual venue photographs best and at what hour, we have a separate ranked list. This piece is about fitting them together.
Where the window sits
The portrait window is set by the sunset time, and the sunset time moves by nearly two hours across the year.
Late afternoon into the last ninety minutes before sunset is the standard slot, and in Brisbane that means starting portraits around 3:30 pm in June and around 5:00 pm in January. The month-by-month table gives the figure for your date.
The morning alternative runs roughly 6:30 am to 9:00 am and is worth considering more often than it is. The light is as good, every location is empty, parking is trivial, and in the wet season you are photographing before the storms have had a chance to build. The trade is obvious: it does not fit a day with an afternoon ceremony, and it means a very early start for a bridal party.
What travel costs you in coverage
Coverage packages run from $698 for one hour to $2,300 for a full twelve-hour day, with a solo photographer on all of them. Somewhere in the middle is the six-hour shape most couples plan, and it is worth being honest about what a distant location does to it.
Mount Coot-tha is the clearest example. It is fifteen to twenty minutes each way from the CBD, so choosing the lookout costs the better part of an hour of coverage once you add the walk from the car park. That can be the right call, because the view is not available anywhere else. It just needs to be a decision rather than an accident. The same maths applies to Cleveland Point, Shorncliffe and anything on the coast.
The rule that survives contact with actual wedding days: if the location is more than fifteen minutes from the ceremony, it needs to replace something rather than be added to it. Full pricing is on the packages page, and there is a longer piece on what the range buys.
The order to shoot in
Family groups first, at the ceremony site, immediately after the ceremony while every relevant person is still standing in one place. Chasing a grandparent across a reception venue at 7:00 pm is a job nobody wants.
Bridal party next, at the same location or the first stop, because there are more people to move and they are easier to move early.
The couple last, at the best light of the day. Twenty to thirty minutes with two people is worth more than an hour with ten.
Wet weather
Most of the best-photographing locations in Brisbane are open parkland with no cover at all. That is fine on the day it does not rain.
Pick your wet-weather location when you pick your main one, not on the morning. It needs to be somewhere you can actually be, at short notice, with the number of people you have, which usually means a built space rather than a tree. The heritage route works for this. So does a hotel lobby near the CBD, which is unglamorous and has rescued a great many afternoons.
Permission
Council parks generally require a booking for a ceremony, and commercial photography can carry its own permit requirement on top of that. The rules change, so confirm the current position with Brisbane City Council, or with the relevant council for anywhere outside the Brisbane local government area, before you lock a time.
For venues and institutions, ask the venue directly what is permitted, where, and at what times. Get the answer before the run sheet is built around it.
Send us the route
If you have a list of four, send it with the ceremony address and the reception address. We will tell you which two survive, what the travel between them costs in coverage, and where the light will be by the time you get there.
