Today’s guest post is from my friend Ellen over at To The Max!  I was one of her bridesmaids way back when and I can still remember her fun-filled wedding.  I asked her for a wedding photo to accompany her wedding advice post but she refused on the grounds of funny looking hair and sent this picture of her cute kids instead….

Hi, everyone. I’m Globetrotting Bride’s longtime friend, Ellen. She likes to call me her “old” friend even though I am less than one year older than her and way more fun.
I have been married for 8 years, which I think qualifies me as a marriage expert. I am also a wedding expert, because I survived planning one. You, too, will be a wedding expert very soon! Congrats! I think childbirth is only slightly harder than planning a wedding.

I was thinking about the best wedding advice I have to offer to you, and here’s one thing that I really only realized in retrospect. Once you pick the guy, the place, and the dress, there is one other thing worth spending more effort on than the invites, the flowers, the placecards, whatever. I’m talking about the photographer.

Once the wedding is over, you will not watch the video that often, until one day your kids make you show it to them and they laugh their asses off at how your hair looks. But the photos are going to decorate your home for the rest of your life. You also want to make sure that you get at least one recommendation from someone who has used the photographer. I did not do that for my wedding, and I regret it. Her work was lovely, she seemed nice in person. But she was disorganized at the wedding, didn’t get a lot of shots I’d asked for and seemed generally overwhelmed, so what if I had invited 836,547 people?

Ha, ha.I only had 150. And I was far from a Bitch-zilla bride, so she really had no excuses. Am I allowed to use that word on this blog? I don’t know, maybe Lyla will fire me as her guest blogger.

So, that is my best wedding-planning advice. What sort of lessons do you guys have to share from your own wedding planning experiences?

Filed under: photography, tips from the pros