Angled Light Photography

Weddings from the Pros

Episode 69 with Nathan and Preston

A lot of details and factors go into planning a wedding and sometimes, it’s too late before we realize that we’ve focused most of our energy and resources on the things that matter the least.

Today, Preston and I are here to help you create a path of right decisions and intentional choices about organizing your wedding to ensure that you don’t miss out on what’s really important to you on your wedding day.

Check out Nathan’s Wedding Photography Studio

Also Find Angled Light Photography here on Instagram & Facebook

In This Episode We Cover:

• Why is it important to understand the meaning of Organization when planning an event.
• How time and money affects your wedding decision.
• Planning ahead of time to avoid activities that may create problems.
• How the quality of your wedding depends on the budget that you allocate and how you maximize it.

Listen to the Full Podcast Here!

Read the Full Transcription Below!

Here at Angled Light photography, We believe marriage is an amazing adventure and your wedding is the jumping off point. We'll explore planning an authentic and meaningful wedding experience as we connect with real life couples, and the industry's top professionals, we're here to inspire and encourage you as you begin this journey of a lifetime. Hey, everybody welcome back to another episode of weddings from the Pros guys, it it is a rainy and wet day outside, but we are firing on all cylinders here in the Single Life photography studio. I'm here with Preston.

How you doing man? Good. How's it going? Yeah, it's we had really nice weather last week I got up to, it was like in the seventies all week and then now spring has kind of dissolved back into winter. Yeah, the plants are going to love this and we have been cranking the coffee. That's for sure. Yeah, I know it's one of those days. For sure, but glad to be back. Yeah, Thanks. So guys, this is going to be episode number two and a special series here that we're doing and this is the wedding from the pros guide to creating intentional fulfilling weddings.

The first episode we did last week. Maybe you heard it if you didn't. I want you to jump back and I want you to find that it was a special episode. Talking about relationships and how that was kind of the first, that's the first level, so to speak, or this first thing that you should really kind of consider if you're the type of couple who wants to be intentional, about creating a really fulfilling wedding experience for you, your spouse, your family, your friends, then I give that episode on relationships.

Listen, because I think it's going to be really important. Yeah, we had a really good discussion and basically we started with relationships because, you know, this kind of relates back to our philosophy of photography here at angle light, but even so when it comes to planning a meaningful wedding, like everything really does revolve around the human connections and who you are as a couple as you're planning, right? And so we kind of, we're encouraging folks to ask questions about what's meaningful to us, what makes us feel most connected to each other, you know, what's our identity, because from that, that's the foundation of every other decision that we make in regards to the wedding day.

And so I think that's a good starting point. This week, we're going to talk about kind of the next big category that we want to push people to start thinking about, and this is kind of broad, right? But it's the organization. So, after you identify, kind of, the meaning driven questions, you start asking yourself questions about, you know, what's the most important to you in terms of who you are and what makes you feel connected to your friends and family and your fiancé, the next practical part of the wedding planning process is jumping right into getting those big pieces set up right?

Yeah, 100%. And I think it's so important to go back and listen to that first episode because what most people do is they jump right into what we're about to talk about today, right? They get engaged and then they go immediately to the checklist. They hop on the wire with the wire was a good show. The wedding wire, right? Wedding wire. Or they hop on the not or they go to their favorite blog and they kind of download a checklist, the things that got to do right. And so they jump straight into the kind of the organizational part of planning a wedding without really considering the things that we had talked about in our previous episode, which is why we felt like it was so important to start there.

And I think that those are the bigger, broader questions that will give you clarity on a lot of the stuff that we're going to talk about today. Okay, so let's assume that you talked about that, let's assume that you sat down with your spouse and you guys had some conversations and let's assume that you're coming to today's episode with a really good understanding of who you are and what's important to you and who is important to you and the nature of those relationships and connections. So what we're going to talk about today is organization and you know, that's one of those things.

That's funny that organizations such a simple thing to understand and yet it is a massively complex thing when it comes to weddings, but Preston and I were literally just sitting here and talking during, before the episode and we came to the conclusion that when it comes to organization, really, you can narrow this down a little bit into two major categories is the organization of time, is the organization of money? Okay, time and money, So I think that's really what we're going to hit home today in this podcast episode.

Yeah, 100%. So we're going to assume that you've come from kind of the first step in relationships. You have answers, good answers and thoughtful answers to questions like what kind of quality time makes me feel most connected to my friends and family, what sort of things do I bond with my fiancée over anything else. If I had to assess the group of guests that I'm going to invite to my wedding, what types of activities and what do I want the wedding ceremony to feel like for them, what do I want the reception to feel like for them, those are going to be kind of the values that help us build our roadmap to where we're going to allocate our time and our money, right?

And obviously we talk about budget kinda from the start here because we realized that a lot of people are planning their weddings through the lens of, basically where is my money going to go? 2% which does make a lot of sense. I mean obviously we're not just philosophizing about what a wedding day is going to be like, we actually have to build it. We actually do have to set out a budget and there is an element that is an event. You know, you're planning an event. So it really comes down to prioritizing where your money is going to go now.

Typically the venue is the first place or the first big purchase that's happening. What would you say? That's true for most of your couples? Yeah, 100%. Once you get all these major components in place, it might be a wedding coordinator, wedding designer. If that's something that you want or it's going to be the venue. I would definitely say though, that venue is either gonna be number one, number two and a lot of cases it's actually number one. So I think you're right about that and the reason for that is pretty massive is because a lot of the other decisions for your wedding day can't be made until, you know, you have a solid idea of where your venue is going to be like your date.

Talking about organizations like once you have your date, like you can't really book a photographer because the photographer can't, you know, say, hey, I'd love to be at your wedding, I'm going to give you a contract and it's gonna sign and I'm gonna be there if they don't know what the date is, right? So that's why it's really critical that the venue is one of those first decisions that you make when it comes to the organizational part of your day. What's interesting about talking about venues though is that it not only influences factors like your budget, like being able to make some of those decisions, like booking other wedding professionals, but it's also, it actually has a big influence on the time.

So it's going back to that time and money part of it, right? Your venue is probably gonna be one of the biggest expenses that you have in your budget for sure. But it's also going to be one of the biggest influential factors in how your timeline is set up for the wedding day. Do you want to give maybe a couple of examples how that might be true? Yeah, for sure. I mean, we talk a lot about trying to pick a space that's suited towards your needs, right?

And so if you've got a really long wedding day and you don't have a huge wedding party, a lot of times people choose to get married in one location and, you know, have the reception at a different location and do the getting ready at a different location. Some of my favorite venue of venue setup that I've seen work, kind of the most seamless across, you know, the years that I've been doing this is kind of the all in one, the all inclusive, right, where you have a place to have your guests stay, if they're in from out of town, you have a place where you can get ready, have a place where you can do the ceremony and perhaps a different on location spot to do the reception.

That is typically my starting point, like if I'm envisioning myself planning a wedding, right? My sister got married at the Blackly right? And so it really was this kind of communal tone to the entire weekend because we were all together, we ate breakfast together, you know, all the family was together and there wasn't a ton of traveling and so that did a couple of things and that's obviously my sister's wedding was super fun. A lot of really sweet memories. But first of all, it set us up to have a lot of quality time with each other because because you're not traveling, right?

Yeah, we're very family oriented. We knew we wanted to get a lot of facetime like that. We just, we like sitting around and having coffee and talking for hours and so we did a lot of that this weekend and so that kind of helped us figure out, you know, we got a lot of quality face time and then it just saved time as well, right? So we got to have a lot of, we didn't spend any time during that day driving around or getting ready or doing anything because we're all staying there for you, and I can think of a kind of, a contrary example to that would be, you know, we've photographed and filmed a lot of weddings that's in this place called Pretty Place.

So, Pretty Place is about an hour away from really any other thing, to be honest with you. Like, there's not really a whole lot of restaurants in the area around pretty place. So, if you have your wedding, a pretty place, which is a spectacular wedding venue, if you don't know, Fred sends chapel, it's uh in the northern part of Greenville County. It is a spectacular because it's basically a chapel sitting on the edge of a mountain and the views are just incredible. Right, incredible. So, people love getting married there.

But the challenge is going to be, you're going to get have your ceremony there and then your reception. If you're going to have one, it's probably going to be maybe 45 minutes to an hour away. Right? So, when you're thinking about your day, like just from a photography perspective, and this is just one perspective, Okay, one perspective, but from a photography perspective, that means that that's essentially around two hours of time that you're just spending traveling, right? If you're trying to really spend time getting as many photos as you possibly can, that's going to be somewhat of a challenge.

But if you know that ahead of time, you can do things to mitigate that, right? So like, let's say for instance that relationships with your wedding party is the most important thing to you and getting as much face time with them as possible is really important to you. Well, if you've got to travel an hour to get to your ceremony location an hour to come back, maybe a party bus would be the right of the party, but the party bus, right? Yeah. And you can even have the photographer with you on the party bus so that as things are happening as you guys are having a good time, he can continue or she can continue to be documenting what's going on, right?

My point is just this think about, you know, when you're talking about your venue and you're thinking about how the time and the schedule is working for your day, the organizational part of that, it goes back to what we're talking about for the last episode, the last podcast that we did, which was relationships and if that's important to you and getting like Preston and his family, getting a lot of face time with each other and be able to spend quality time with each other is important, then, you know, that's going to factor into the decision about where you end up having your wedding, like the venue that you choose is probably gonna be one of the, again, just like we said earlier, one of the biggest influential factors, you know, I can also think of Dan and Allison, that was the first wedding that, that was like one of the most beautiful venues that we've ever gotten this year.

Yeah, so they were at their, in Kiawah Island, they were at this place called the Sanctuary and again, they being at the beach and being on the coast is like of incredible importance to them. That was a big part of who they are. They chose to have their wedding out there, but the venue allowed for everything that happened right there, there was no travel time anywhere, right? So they were able to structure really the entire day around the things that were important to them and they spent their time the way that they wanted to spend their time.

So I just think it's really, really important to kind of consider all those factors, They had their ceremony right outside and then people just literally just walked inside for cocktail hour and we were able to do lots of photos and everything outside and then everybody went into basically this really beautiful gigantic ballroom, that's where they ended up having the reception there at the sanctuary. So it's just another example, I think that one of the biggest mistakes that most couples make is they don't think ahead of time about what's important to them when they go into the organization, part of the process, right?

They don't think about, you know, who do I really want to spend time with what's important to the relationship between me and these people, right? And without that clarity going into the organizational part, the downside is you can make some decisions that you probably wouldn't have made if you had thought about those other things beforehand. Yeah, hindsight's 2020 hindsight's 2020 I love that wedding and I don't think I'll forget it obviously, because this was Nathan's and I's first time working together, you know, and then at this point it was a couple of years ago, but the feeling in the room of that reception, like, I think that's a good example too, of choosing a location that really reflects something about you, right?

That this is a very classic, it's basically an old hotel and there's these mirrored staircases that are climbing up the side of this, you know, massive three story hotel. It's got the classic southern pillars, like it was a very upscale and it reflects them, right? Like when I think of Dan Nelson, I think classy, like that's just kind of there, like there now I'm thinking of the office, very classic. Yeah, but no, but they're very classy couple, both as individuals and together as a couple, that's who they are.

So the venue that they chose was a perfect reflection of that. Yeah, they, basically, you could tell that they, a lot of, you know, a good portion of their budget because that was having that vibe was important to them. They combine that with getting a live band and I think like the spot that we were in in the live music at that, at that reception more than the flowers, more than anything else. At least for me personally, just walking around the room and kind of taking witness this awesome party.

Like those two things work together and created an entire feeling in the room, right? You know, that option wouldn't have been great for the couple that wants a small, intimate, rustic wedding, right? Both great options, but both geared for two totally different feelings in two totally different atmospheres. Two totally different couples, they value different sets of things, right? And so when I think that's the perfect segue way to talk about budget, right? So, we kind of talked a little bit, we gave a few examples of how, you know, being intention about the timeline and the time that you're spending on your wedding day is important how to organize that and how to think about the relationships that matter most to you and how that kind of influences some of those decisions.

But now let's talk a little bit about budget. So that's a perfect example, right? Because typically, and this is very typically having a DJ is going to be more affordable than having a band, right? Having live musicians there in almost every case, I don't think I've ever seen it the other way around. So they had to be very intentional dan and Allison said to themselves? You know, having live music at our event, like the way that they spent time with each other is they traveled to go see live music, like to go find a concert of their favorite musician and in their favorite band, they would hop on a flight and they would fly to, you know, Chicago new york, they would go places red rocks out in Colorado, like they would go places specifically to hear, see and experience live music.

Live music was a big deal to them, right? They couldn't see their wedding without live music. So, you know, when you get a good feeling and a good idea of who you are as a couple and the nature of your relationship, it allows you to make some very, very good honest intentional decisions about how you want to spend that budget that you have, we're not here to tell you what your budget should be right, Like that's not like we can't tell you what a dollar amount should be for your wedding, how much you should be spending on this and how much you should be spending on that every budget is different when you're thinking about budget, it's really, really important that you realize that really any budget is going to get you what you want, As long as you're very careful about the decisions that you're making, right?

And you're very honest and upfront with yourself and those that are around you, helping you plan your wedding, you know, what is it that's important to you and how are you going to spend the money that you do have adequately? I have been to weddings that have, you know, a $15,000 budget and I have seen how the couple walks away from that wedding. I felt like as fulfilled if not more fulfilled than weddings, that I have documented, that have been had to have been $150,000 plus, right? I don't think that necessarily the budget that you have is going to be an indicator of the quality of the wedding that you're going to have far from it, far from it.

But what we can do is we can be very upfront honest with ourselves with how much we're working with and then make sure that we're allocating the portions of that budget that really go towards the things that are important to you. So let's say for instance, that you hate to do this as a wedding photographer, but this is the first one that comes to mind, let's say for instance, that wedding photography is massively important to you, right? Like you love art and you wanted to find and spend money on a photographer who is highly creative, who is somebody who is going to document your story, you feel like differently than most other photographers could and you're willing to spend money on that.

Well, that's okay, right. It just means that you're going to have to take some money that you would be spending on other things and you don't have to pull back on those things a little bit. Right? It doesn't mean that you're not going to have as incredible of an experience. It just simply means that in order to walk away from a fulfilling wedding experience, you just got to be more careful about where you're spending money. Now, Preston and I were having a conversation about the fact that you've got to be honest, right?

Being honest up front when you're making these decisions is a big part of it because that's probably the other thing that we've seen couples struggle with is, you know, because they're not aware of how much things cost. There's definitely a vision in their head for what they want. And then when they go to the table to try to make those decisions without being again, very honest with the wedding professionals that they're working with or without being really honest with perhaps, I don't know, you know, a friend who's doing the wedding planning with you or who's being honest with their wedding designer, who's being honest with their mother.

Like if there's like a mother of the bride or a mother of the groom, right? Those kind of things can play into it. Their budget will get away from them and it would cause them to have, it will cause some problems in the journey of planning the wedding. Hey guys, this is Nathan, I just wanted to jump in here really quickly and tell you if these concepts that you're listening to right now resonate with you the idea that maybe I should be asking myself some of the bigger questions in order to craft a really meaningful wedding, I want to encourage you to go to weddings from the pros dot com and check out an upcoming event that Preston are gonna be putting on is called the weddings from the Pros Guide to crafting a meaningful wedding experience.

We really want this to be at the forefront of people's minds when they're making all their decisions and when it comes to crafting a really unforgettable wedding. And so if you're interested in that, just head over to the website www dot weddings from the pros dot com, right at the top, you'll see where you can sign up and get email notifications for the upcoming live training that we have. Let me know if you have any questions and now back to the show. Yeah, that's a good point.

And I think we often see situations where people get out ahead of themselves in terms of the budget or in terms of the timeline, right? Because building your timeline is the same thing, you're just budgeting where you want the hours in the day to go right and people spending too much upfront without doing a little bit of thought, right, we're not discouraging people from saying, hey, I really want to invest in this particular venue because my grandparents got married and this is really important to us, right?

So if you know that important things like we're not trying to discourage people from investing, but it's really just about being honest with yourself, like actually sitting down and saying, hey, how much can be spent on this wedding and that way you can make an informed, realistic decision on the front end so that you don't get in the all too common position of, you know, spending 40% more on your venue than you thought you were going to and then having to give up something else later down the road because you know, you just didn't think about it and you weren't realistic in the way that you were thinking about how much time is in a day or how much money is in your budget and then you have to go without in some other area, right?

You end up with a photographer, you're not happy with because you spend all your money on catering. Right? And I've seen it happen a couple times where the bride kind of broke the couple broke their budget on a venue and they spent a lot more than they thought they would on the venue itself because they really loved it. Big place. Beautiful. But then they didn't have the budget to decorate its appropriately, right? Because they've got this massive space that's kind of a blank canvas, so to speak and to make it look the way that she had envisioned.

She didn't realize how much money that was going to take, right? So now they've invested the money, they signed the contract, they got this space and now they're trying to figure out how they're going to, you know, spend the money to actually bring in and stylized there. They've got a lot of venue that they got to decorate. So you know, those are the challenges that can kind of come forward. And I'll say this before we move on, which I think is really important. You know, it's funny like one of the old adage is that I've heard, it seems like I hear it more now in my thirties and I did my twenties, but I think it's true.

You show a person your checkbook and they'll tell you what's important to you, right? You show a person, your calendar, they will tell you what's important to you, right? And I think that this is really important to understand the correlation that we're talking about here between understanding what's important to you, what's a reflection of you, what matters to you as a couple of both of you, right? And making decisions when it comes to time and money because really, again, going back when it comes to organization, those are the two biggest influential factors that I feel like as far as the organizational part of this process that really leads couples to filling fulfilled, you know, at the end of the night, 100%.

I was going to say there's a lot of kind of expectations and kind of things that you assume in the wedding planning process. And I think we always try to make it a point to encourage people that weddings don't have to look or feel like any one specific thing they can be anything you want them to be. And as long as you've answered those questions, you can do a good job of matching and making a wedding that you're really going to love with a broad range of budgets, right?

One wedding I was going to bring up, you were saying something earlier and I was thinking for some of our more nostalgic couples, like one of my favorite weddings that we've done was actually, it was during the covid era and we had a couple who got ended up getting married at a state park, right? And so we found this really cool little place that was overlooking the lake. It was very serene was very intimate and then we spent an extra amount of time and as far as their actual wedding day, right where most of their budget went, was getting the perfect dress, right?

The dream dress for her that she wanted and then investing in fine art, photography. And so that's where they allocated a disproportionate amount of their money towards photography and spent barely anything on the actual ceremony. Right? So this is the opportunity like this was a great example of someone getting really creative and really leaning into the things that were important to them and not stressing out about the things that weren't important to them. And it ended up being unconventional. But I think they were really happy with that day.

I mean, I think we all had fun. Yeah, 100%. Well, and you know, going back. So let's, let's talk about timeline. Just little bit more to, you know, when you talk about allocating time, one of the things that we see often is a speeches, you know, and again, being honest with everybody about speeches. You wanted to kind of touch on that because being the filmmaker, your the one between the two of us like, yeah, you go back and you have to relive speeches over and over and over.

Well, on one hand, you know, the documentary style film that we do here in the studio, We rely heavily on on spoken word to help tell the couple's story. And so I like long speeches as a filmmaker. I've also been to a lot of weddings as a guest and your listeners can tell us what you think about long toasts. We've all been to that wedding where 15 people have a lot of really authentic, thoughtful things to say about the couple. But you end up in a situation where, you know, you're toast are going on for an hour plus, right?

We've all been to that wedding. And again, it's not that those toasts and speeches aren't important, but when it comes down to prioritizing what's the most important and really budgeting your time and money in a realistic way. Well, a lot of times, you know, this thought of, well, I don't want someone to feel left out or I want to make sure they get to speak their piece ends up being at the end of the night, you're walking out to your sparklers and you think, man, I feel like I only got to dance for 45 minutes, right, that this is a really common the thing that we hear from couples at the end of the night because we always try to have an open dialogue with the couples we work with because we're always constantly trying to get feedback about what works best.

What are people satisfied in terms of decisions on their wedding day and identify some themes across the board? But this is a really common one. And so just being realistic about how long the speeches are actually gonna take asking your coordinator being informed so that you can make a strong decision because a lot of those people on the back end, you know, they would have said, hey, we need to start the reception an hour earlier if we're going to do this right? Or maybe we get creative and we let two people or four people share during the reception and we push everybody else and create a new opportunity at the rehearsal dinner, invite them to do their right.

So it's really a matter of just being realistic about the time and money you have to spend and being open to being creative because there's almost always a solution. And I love that idea that there's almost no problem that can't be solved with a little bit of creativity, right? And just being open to maybe doing some untraditional options really. Most everything can be solved that way. And you know, I was just thinking like when you were talking about that whole process, like it is going to cause or not, cause it's going to require is the right word.

It's going to require again honesty, right? Like you're gonna have to go to whoever it is that you want to include in the speeches, right? And you're gonna have to be honest with them and just say, hey, we just don't want our speeches. It's not like we necessarily value one over the other. It's just that we don't want our speeches to get too long. So we would love to have you please speak at our reception. We don't have anybody else speaking at our reception. We would love to have that moment of celebration at our reception.

We would really love for you to honor us by spending some time at the reception, the rehearsal dinner. That's what I'm trying to say, speaking about us and your experience with us and whatever your thoughts are that you wanted to share at the wedding, share it at the rehearsal dinner instead. You know, that's going to require some honesty and confrontation is the wrong word, but you're just gonna have to be upfront with the people who are involved in that decision. You know, and I think that most of the time and this goes down to just most of the time, any time that there's going to be a problem, communicating early and communicating honestly is usually going to solve most of your problems, right?

This is not just communicating early, communicating honestly is going to is going to solve most of the problems before they become a problem. And, you know, this entire example that we're talking about here, this is under the assumption that this couple that's listening to this right now actually does want to dance longer, right? Maybe they don't, and maybe they would prefer to have an hour or an hour and a half of speeches, you know, at their wedding during the reception, like if that's you, that's great. You accomplish exactly what you want.

The important thing is just to sit down and know what you want, think about what you want, right? And to really involve you. You know, that this should be a big conversation. You and your spouse need to sit down and think about what are the things that each of you guys really value? And again, you know, I gave this little task in the first episode, but I'll do it again. Here again, do the same thing that you did earlier, sit down with a piece of paper and pen.

Have your spouse sit down with a piece of paper and pen and each of you individually come up with the top three things that matter to you. Like what are the top three things timeline wise that are important to you when it comes to the wedding day? Right? And each of you list out the top three things that matter to each of you without talking before him because that way when you guys come together, you might have some really interesting conversations that come out of that and you'll probably gain a little bit of clarity in order to make better decisions.

Likewise, talk about budget, right? So he needs to sit down with a piece of paper and pen. You need to sit down with a piece of paper and pen. Hopefully at this point you've either done research or you've gotten a wedding coordinator involved. Somebody who can help you know what realistically the prices of things are going to be. And then, you know, he needs at the top of that paper to write down what the budget that he would like to see. And you need to write down at the top of your paper, the budget you'd like to see and then what are the biggest things that matter the most to you in the wedding and then again, come together, share the top three things for each of you and come to some consensus is there right?

Like that's super important. So that when you walk into the rest of the journey that you're about to walk into planning this thing, I mean guys, this is not like a weeklong affair, like, you know when you're talking about planning a wedding is typically 68, 10, 12 months, right? 14 months. It's not uncommon to have it a year and a half. It's important that you know, this time you both go in with some mental and emotional clarity around these two very, very big organizational pieces, which again is time and money, how are you going to invest your time and how are you going to invest your money on the wedding day to ensure that this once in a lifetime opportunity that you have is going to be worth it at the end of the day. Yeah.

And I think as we move on next week, we'll talk a little bit more about kind of the details right? The style, the things that you do to the space and the little activities that you add in that kind of personalized to a further degree, your wedding day and we'll keep budget and timeline in mind when making those decisions as well. But I think you made a good point, like really thinking about the biggest things on the front end is like very, very helpful for us. You probably heard the like the age old age old analogy where the professor is putting rocks into the jar and then, you know, asks, is the jar full and then he puts, you know, pebbles into the jar and then he puts sand into the jar and then he puts water into the jar.

And so if you're adding those big things and ironing out those big things on the front end, just from like a functional perspective, like the event planning side goes way way easier. Once you get those big decisions thoughtfully answered, right? Because once you have your venue, once you have your caterer, once you have your entertainment, there's really kind of five or six big vendor decisions, right? All of those need to really come after picking the venue right? Because you need a venue and you need a date at least to work with most other wedding professionals or at least to set them in stone.

But once you get those five or six things like that's the fun part, then that's when you get to go, you know, do the dress shopping, do the, you know, go pick up the entire pick out the flowers, it all gets yeah, 100% go to a wedding festival, have fun, like everything really does simplify a lot when you get those big core pieces out, everything else kind of falls into place easier and I think that that's important because we always say like engagement is, should be a fun season of life, right?

Like you're only engage one time, the wedding planning process should be fun and so we encourage people to, as soon as you have, you know, been thoughtful and iron out your budget, get those big pieces in place so that you can enjoy the rest of the process in a more relaxed way, that's more, you know, that's less stress and more enjoying this special season of life because you only, you only get to do it once. Yeah, 100%. So Preston was going to be the final and last topic that we're gonna talk about when it comes to having a successful wedding planning journey that's going to lead to fulfilling wedding, Ooh, style, right?

So I mentioned it earlier, but um you know, once you've got those big kind of functional places right? I mean this week we're talking really more about answering the questions, how are we going to put a roof over everyone's head? How are we going to get everyone seated? How we're gonna get everyone fed, how we're gonna provide them beverages kind of the essential, functional pieces of the wedding day, but then there's this whole arena over here where it comes into, we're kind of talking about design, right?

We're talking about style, We're talking about personalization. And so the next set of questions that we kind of want to go through our, you know, what kind of aesthetic slash atmosphere represents, the feeling that I want to have on my wedding day, right? What kinds of rituals or activities during my ceremony do I feel like resonate with me and are meaningful to me according to what my fiancé and I think about what marriage is to us, right? And so we're going to talk a little bit more in the details, a little bit more about how to filter kind of the smaller creative decisions that give the wedding day.

It's texture. And this is something that people typically start with, right? They start with the fine fine details. But the fine fine details get really, really easy to deal with whenever we have everything else in place. And we're building kind of on the skeleton of like an actual functional, well planned out timeline in a functional place, Right? Yeah, yeah. And I can't agree with you more. I think the biggest problem is that oftentimes couples, like we said earlier, they literally approached the process backwards. They approach it backwards from what would be much harder in the beginning are actually harder questions, but they are worthwhile.

It is massively important and it's going to lead again, I've used this where clarity a lot. It seems like in this episode, but it's going to lead to a lot of clarity in making the decision that you're going after that really, really easy, right? Yeah. If you work from the details back up to the core values, there's a chance that you may miss the mark and those are the couples that we talked to that have, which is typical, the 80% wedding, right? A wedding that was great. It was a fun day and it was 80% of what they wanted it to be.

But there were some things that mismatched, right? They spent time on things that weren't important to them. They spent money on things that weren't important to them. They invited people that weren't important to them, right? That's the gap between this idyllic, the dream wedding and most weddings. And if we start at the other end, right? We answer those important questions. Then moving all the way down to the details you can't miss, right? Because you have a heading. You have values that you're chasing with every tiny logistical decision that you're making.

Couldn't said it better myself. Alright guys, so be on the lookout for that episode next week that we have on style. It's going to be fun for pressing on to kind of share our thoughts on that with all the weddings that both he and I have experienced here angle life photography guys, we hope that you have an amazing day and we hope that this has been helpful and we will see you next time I see you here, angle life photography, we believe marriage is an amazing adventure, and your wedding is the jumping off point.

We'll explore planning an authentic and meaningful wedding experience as we connect with real life couples and the industry's top professionals. We're here to inspire and encourage you as you begin this journey of a lifetime.

---

If you enjoy this post Please follow us at our Instagram and Facebook page.

Thank you for Listening

---