How to Photograph Two Grooms on Their Wedding Day
Most wedding photography shot lists were built around an old assumption: one bride, one groom, two sides of the family, two mirrored blocks of "getting ready" coverage. None of that template holds when you're photographing two grooms, and that's not a problem to work around so much as a different brief to plan for properly.
Family groupings and getting ready
Start with the family groupings. Rather than defaulting to "bride's side" and "groom's side," build the group list from scratch with both grooms, asking who belongs in which combination and whether any groupings need to stay separate for reasons that are entirely their own business. A five-minute conversation before the day saves a scrambled, awkward moment when everyone's already gathered and waiting in the sun.
Getting-ready coverage works best when you know in advance whether the two grooms are dressing in one location or two. Two locations means covering two parallel stories rather than one story with a supporting cast, which changes how time gets split between them. One location usually means looking for a quieter moment before the room fills with groomsmen and family — the two of them alone, briefly, tends to produce the calmest and most honest images of the whole morning.
Formalwear, posing and light
Formalwear is where composition gets genuinely interesting. Two grooms often choose the same suit, sometimes down to the same fabric, which is a nice sentiment but a real challenge for a photograph — two identical dark shapes side by side can flatten into one silhouette, especially in flat light. Small variations in tie colour, boutonniere, or a waistcoat versus none help separate them visually. If the suits really are identical, posing and light do the work instead: turning one groom slightly more toward camera than the other, using directional light so one side catches a highlight while the other falls into gentle shadow, or letting height and stance create contrast rather than mirroring their positions exactly.
Portraits benefit from resisting the instinct to pose two people symmetrically just because the framing looks tidy that way. Two men of similar height and build, posed identically, can read as stiff on camera. Give them something to do with each other instead of with the lens — walking together, a private joke, one adjusting the other's collar — and let genuine interaction shape the composition rather than forcing a formula built for a differently gendered pairing.
The light itself doesn't care who's standing in it. Open shade, the soft glow of late afternoon, a doorway with even light spilling through — these fundamentals apply to any two people getting married, and they're worth leaning on precisely because so much else about the day is being figured out fresh. South African locations offer this in their own way: a quiet Cape Town side street in the day's last hour of light, a Karoo stoep throwing long shadows, a Durban garden softened by coastal haze.
Above all, ask rather than assume. Two grooms may want classic, formal coverage; they may want almost no posed portraits at all; they may have strong feelings about which relatives appear together and which don't. None of that is guesswork to do alone — it's a conversation worth having well before the wedding morning, so that on the day itself, the camera can simply get out of the way.
