Top Tips: An Unplugged Wedding Ceremony

After a recent poll on my Instagram Stories, it became clear that many of you don’t know what an unplugged wedding is! Well let me help you with some top tips to make sure your wedding photos are the absolute bomb-diggidy, aided by going unplugged.

Now, going ‘unplugged’ may sound frightening, like you’re expected to hold a wedding without access to light or power, the toilet is a hole in the ground, that sort of thing. Of course, that’s not what we mean by an unplugged wedding. To be more specific, I’m referring to unplugged wedding ceremonies. These are ceremonies where your guests are asked to refrain from using their mobile devices or any electronics during the ceremony, and instead do the old-fashioned thing of just enjoying themselves. There are so many benefits in doing this:

By asking our family and friends to pack away their mobile phones, we’re inviting them to be present in the important milestone of your wedding ceremony. So instead of squinting at you through a small smartphone screen, they’re looking at you with their own eyeballs and giving you their full attention. Let me tell you that a bunch of people smiling back at you as you walk up the aisle is so much more comforting than a bunch of people sticking their iPhone in your gob. At one wedding the bride and her father had to WALK AROUND someone in the aisle who was videoing with their iPad. ??

Of course there are added benefits for me too! It really helps my photos to see a sea of happy faces surrounding you rather than a sea of mobile phones. And sometimes, not always but sometimes, one or both of the couple can be obscured in my photos because someone’s sticking their iPad in front of someone’s face. It’s not ideal and I can’t stop the ceremony to ask someone to refrain from doing that, so you’ll just have to expect your ceremony photos have a giant iPad where your head should be.

Many registrars these days ask you before your civil ceremony whether you’d like guests to be asked not to take photos during your ceremony, but just in case they don’t, you can always plonk some signs in your ceremony space politely asking people to not use their devices.

You can see lots of great examples of unplugged ceremony signs on Pinterest HERE

I personally really appreciate couples who have unplugged ceremonies so everyone involved can really feel everything in the moment. It’s not something that can be replicated, we can’t do it again, let’s make it the best it can possibly be. We wanna see everyone in their feels.