Nobody books a photographer for six hours because they measured their day. They book six hours because it sounds like enough.
Then the run sheet gets written, and it turns out the family groups need forty minutes rather than fifteen, the drive to the portrait location is twenty-five minutes rather than twelve, and the coverage runs out somewhere between the entrée and the speeches. The fix is not more hours. The fix is knowing what each block actually costs before you choose the number.
Here is a Brisbane wedding day taken apart into its pieces, with an honest allowance against each one.
Preparation: 60 to 90 minutes
This is the block couples cut first and regret last. An hour gives you the room, the dress on the hanger, the shoes and the rings, the last of the hair and makeup, the reactions, and a set of portraits with the people who have been in the room all morning. Ninety minutes gives you all of that without anybody being asked to redo something for the camera.
The constraint that matters here is that coverage is solo. One photographer cannot be at two addresses at once, so if you are preparing in different suburbs, that is not one block, it is two blocks with a drive in between. Either both parties get ready at the same venue, which is by far the cheapest answer in coverage terms, or you accept that one side gets twenty minutes and the other gets an hour.
Where it overruns. Hair and makeup. Every time. Build in a buffer at the end of the preparation block rather than at the start of the ceremony, because the buffer at the start of the ceremony is the one that gets eaten.
A first look, if you want one: 20 to 30 minutes
Not a tradition here, and not for everybody. But it is the single most effective thing you can do to a tight timeline, because it moves a portion of your couple portraits from the busiest part of the afternoon to the quietest.
Thirty minutes covers the walk to somewhere private enough, the moment itself, and fifteen or twenty minutes of portraits immediately afterwards while you are both still alone. What that buys you later is a shorter portrait session after the ceremony, which is when everyone is waiting on you.
Skip it if the first sight down the aisle matters more to you than the timeline does. That is a legitimate trade and plenty of couples make it.
Travel: 20 to 30 minutes per move
Not the drive time. The door-to-door time.
Gathering people, driving, parking near the river on a Saturday, walking in from wherever a hire car can legally stop, and a minute for a photographer to read a location they have just arrived at. Twenty to thirty minutes, every time, before a single frame exists. There is a longer piece on how many locations survive one day and what each move costs you.
The ceremony: 20 to 45 minutes, plus 15 either side
A civil ceremony usually runs twenty to thirty minutes. A church or cultural ceremony can run an hour or more, and the rules about where a photographer may stand vary by church and by celebrant, so that is a question to ask early rather than on the morning.
The fifteen minutes before is guest arrivals, the venue while it is still empty and tidy, and the two of you before anyone has seen you. The fifteen minutes after is the crush of congratulations, which nobody puts on a run sheet and which happens at every single wedding. It is also where a lot of the best unposed photographs of the day come from, so it is not a block to squeeze.
Family groups: budget 3 minutes per combination, and count them
This is the block that breaks timelines, so here is the arithmetic in full.
Three minutes per grouping is achievable when the list is written, the names are read out, and the people are within earshot. Five minutes per grouping is what actually happens when somebody has to be found. A list of ten combinations is therefore thirty to fifty minutes, not the fifteen it gets on the run sheet, and a list of twenty is most of an hour and a half.
Do these at the ceremony site, immediately afterwards, while every relevant person is still standing in the same three metres of grass. Chasing a grandparent across a reception venue at seven o'clock is a job nobody wants and it costs four times as long.
The list itself is the thing that decides whether this block takes thirty-five minutes or seventy, and it is the one piece of paper only you can write. There is a separate article on how to write it, including who should be the named person calling the names out on the day, because it should not be either of you.
Bridal party and couple portraits: 45 to 90 minutes combined
Bridal party first, because there are more people to move and they are easier to move early. The two of you last, in the best light of the day.
Forty-five minutes is workable at one location. Ninety is comfortable and allows one move. If you have planned two moves inside this window, one of them will be cut on the day, and it will be cut badly rather than deliberately.
Reception: 20 minutes of room, then the program
The room needs to be photographed before your guests are in it. That means being at the venue about twenty minutes before doors open, styling still going on around you, which in turn means the portrait session finished twenty minutes earlier than you think.
After that the reception is mostly a sequence of scheduled events with soft gaps between them. Entrance, five minutes. Speeches, thirty to sixty depending on how many people hold a microphone and how honest they are about the time limit. Cake and first dance, fifteen to twenty together. Dancing after that is the part where an extra hour of coverage returns the least, because 10:30 pm looks a great deal like 9:00 pm once the lights are down.
The exit: 10 minutes, whenever you decide it is
A sparkler tunnel, a car, a hallway of people. It takes ten minutes and it is a genuinely good closing frame.
The problem is that it usually happens at eleven, and paying for coverage from nine to eleven to get it is an expensive ten minutes. Stage it earlier. Gather everyone at the end of the block you have already paid for, walk out, come back in and keep dancing. It photographs identically and nobody in the room minds.
The two things Brisbane does to this timeline
Summer pushes everything late. From December through February the light stays harsh until well into the evening, so the portrait block cannot sit where a winter timeline would put it, and a ceremony at two o'clock puts your guests in direct sun at the hottest, most humid part of the day. Late afternoon is the answer, which then compresses everything after it. The month-by-month sunset table has the working times for your date, and it is the first thing to check before you commit to a ceremony time.
The wet season builds in the afternoon. Roughly November to March, the storms arrive in the same part of the day your portraits need. That does not mean move the wedding. It means the wet-weather location is a decision you make when you make the main one, and a timeline with fifteen minutes of slack in it survives a shower where a timeline with none does not.
Mapping the blocks onto the six packages
Coverage is sold by the hour: one, three, six, eight, ten or twelve. Below is what each one reaches on a January day with a 4:00 pm ceremony. Move the ceremony and every row moves with it.
| Package | Hours | Price | On a 4:00 pm ceremony | Reaches |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Whispers of love | 1 | $698 | 3:50 – 4:50 pm | Ceremony and a short group set, one address only |
| Heartfelt moments | 3 | $980 | 3:30 – 6:30 pm | Arrivals, ceremony, family groups, portraits |
| Timeless union | 6 | $1,498 | 2:00 – 8:00 pm | Late preparation through to the speeches |
| Eternal vows | 8 | $1,800 | 1:00 – 9:00 pm | Full preparation, room for one location move |
| Forever after | 10 | $2,050 | 12:00 – 10:00 pm | Preparation from the start, through the first dance |
| Endless romance | 12 | $2,300 | 10:00 am – 10:00 pm | Two ceremonies, a large guest list, or both |
Read it against your own blocks rather than against the prices. Add up preparation, travel, ceremony, groups, portraits and the reception events you actually care about. If the total lands within about an hour of the next package up, take the next package up, because the hour you are adding is cheaper than the hour you are already paying for. The full breakdown of what the range buys has the per-hour figures.
Every package includes the same things regardless of length: a consultation by phone before the day, professionally edited digital images and an online gallery. Files arrive within four weeks, full resolution, on USB, never watermarked, and you choose which images go into the photo book. Bookings are held with a 50% deposit, with the balance due a week before the wedding. All of it is set out on the pricing page.
Build it backwards
The mistake is starting at the top of the day and adding blocks until the hours run out, which puts the thing you least care about at the end of your coverage and the thing you most care about outside it.
Start at the bottom. Decide the last frame you want to own. Then subtract the reception, the portraits, the groups, the ceremony, the travel and the preparation, in that order, until you hit a start time. That number, not the number that sounded about right, is the package you need.
Send us the ceremony time, the two addresses and the rough size of the guest list, and we will send back a timeline with the honest minutes written against each block, before you book anything. More on how we work a wedding day is on the weddings page, and you can start that conversation here.
