Brisbane's storm season runs roughly November to March, and the storms build with the heat of the afternoon. That is the same part of the day your ceremony is in.
It sounds like bad news and it is only half bad. A summer storm here often arrives, empties itself and clears inside an hour, and the twenty minutes it hands back afterwards can be the best light of the day. A rain band in June sitting over the whole of South East Queensland does none of that. It is simply wet from eight in the morning until after dark.
Those are two different problems and they need two different plans. Most couples prepare one plan, for the wrong one.
The afternoon storm
Radar shows a cell, it goes very dark, it is loud, and then it is over. The plan here is delay rather than relocation.
If your ceremony can start twenty-five minutes late without breaking anything else on the run sheet, you have already solved it. The way to make that true is to build the slack in when you write the timeline, not to find it on the day. Half an hour of nothing between the ceremony and the first speech is dead time on a dry day and it is the entire wet-weather plan on a wet one.
The all-day band
No delay helps. There is no window coming.
This one has to be called early and then left alone. The mistake is treating it like the first case, waiting to see, and ending up moving furniture with guests already standing in it. If the forecast on Thursday says a rain band, decide on Thursday.
That distinction is the useful part of a forecast. Four days out, the difference between a storm risk and a rain band is genuinely readable, even though the timing of any individual storm is not.
Somebody who is not you makes the call
Name one person. A planner or venue coordinator if you have one, and a specific named person if you do not — not "the bridal party", not "we'll see". Write the name on the run sheet next to the time.
Then set the time, and set it by asking the venue one question: how long does the changeover take? Moving a hundred chairs, a signing table and a PA under cover is not a five-minute job, and the honest answer is usually longer than the brochure implies. Put the decision that long before the ceremony, plus twenty minutes.
Then write the rule as a sentence anyone can execute without you. If it is raining at 1:30 pm, we are inside. A rule made on Tuesday is a rule. The same conversation started at 1:30 pm on Saturday is an argument, held in front of guests, by people wearing the good clothes.
Go and stand in the covered option
Every venue has a wet-weather answer. Most of the time it is a sentence on a website and a photograph taken with the lights on and nobody in the room.
Go and stand in it, at roughly the hour your ceremony would run, and look at four things.
Where the light comes from. One large window down one side is the best thing that can happen to an indoor ceremony. Downlights only, with no window at all, is workable but it is a different-looking set of photographs and you should know that in advance rather than discover it.
What is behind the celebrant. You will be looking at it for twenty minutes and so will the camera. A fire exit sign, a stacked pile of chairs and a bain-marie are all things that can be moved on the morning if somebody has noticed them beforehand.
Whether everyone fits. Rooms are quoted seated. Wet-weather ceremonies are often standing, in a space also holding a hundred people's umbrellas.
What happens in the gap. This is where wet weddings actually go wrong. Not the ceremony — the forty minutes after it, when the same room has to become the reception and there is nowhere to put the guests. Ask the question directly and get a real answer.
The venue-by-venue version of this, including which Brisbane locations have no covered option at all, is in ten Brisbane wedding venues and the best hour to shoot each.
Umbrellas are a decision, not a repair
Buy them in advance and buy them all the same. This is a small amount of money that changes how an entire set of photographs looks.
Clear domes keep faces visible, which matters if you want photographs of people rather than of umbrellas. A single strong colour reads as a graphic block and can look superb, particularly against grey. Either works. What does not work is whatever eleven guests happened to have in the car, which is eleven different shapes in every wide frame.
Two large ones are worth more than ten small ones. A golf umbrella covers two people and a dress. A compact does not cover one.
And be clear with yourself about what an umbrella is. Two people under one umbrella in the rain is a photograph about rain, and it can be one of the best in the set — but it is one photograph, not a plan.
Overcast light is genuinely on your side
Nobody wants cloud and cloud is kind.
Direct summer sun at two in the afternoon puts hard shadows across faces, makes everybody squint, and blows the detail out of a white dress. Cloud removes all three at once. The light becomes even and soft, colours saturate rather than bleach, and there is no bad direction to stand in — which means the ceremony can face any way and the family groups can go anywhere.
Wet ground helps too. Stone and bitumen turn reflective and start doing things dry ground never does.
What cloud does to the end of the day is a separate question, and it is covered in the month-by-month light table. The short version: thin high cloud extends the good light and adds colour, a solid grey bank ends it early, and a storm that clears before sunset can hand back twenty extraordinary minutes.
The clock does not stop
Coverage is booked in hours — one, three, six, eight, ten or twelve — and a storm delay spends them the same way anything else does. Waiting out forty minutes of rain in the middle of a six-hour booking costs forty minutes of the reception at the other end.
If your date falls in storm season and your ceremony is late in the afternoon, the honest fix is either an earlier ceremony or the next package up. Both are decisions to make while you are planning, cheaply, rather than on the day.
Coverage is also solo — one photographer, on every package — so if the wet-weather plan splits people across two rooms, say which room matters.
Where you stand financially
Weddings are booked with a 50% deposit, with the balance due one week before the date.
If you cancel, the deposit is not refunded. It holds the date and turns away other enquiries for it, which is what a deposit is for. A balance already paid is refunded; the deposit is not. If Dennis has to cancel, everything paid comes back in full, and where possible he will try to refer another Brisbane photographer — offered in good faith rather than as a guarantee.
What the policy does not do is say anything at all about weather. There is no rain clause, no wet-weather refund and no automatic postponement term, in either direction. Rain on the day is not a cancellation: the booking stands and the coverage runs.
So if there is any chance you would move a date rather than get married in the wet, ask about it in writing before you are anywhere near the week of the wedding. Getting that answer nine months out costs nothing. Getting it on the Thursday costs a great deal.
We photograph across Brisbane, Ipswich, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast. Wedding coverage runs from $698 for one hour to $2,300 for a full twelve-hour day, all six packages on the pricing page, with what each includes on the weddings page. Send the date and the venue through the contact page, and if it is somewhere we have worked, we will tell you honestly what the covered option there is like.
