Welcome Drinks and the Rehearsal Dinner
The evening before a wedding has quietly become one of the best parts of the whole weekend. Whether you call it a rehearsal dinner, welcome drinks or simply supper for whoever has arrived, it is the moment when the guests stop being a list and turn into a group of people who know each other. It is also, photographically, quite unlike the day that follows.
What the evening is really for
On the wedding day itself you will speak to almost everybody and properly to almost nobody. That is not a failure of planning, it is arithmetic. The night before is where the actual conversations happen: the friend who flew in, the uncle you have not seen in years, the two sets of parents working out how they feel about each other.
Because nothing is being performed, people behave like themselves. Shoulders are down. Nobody is watching the time. If you have ever looked at a set of wedding photographs and thought the guests looked slightly stiff, this evening is the answer to that.
Why it photographs differently
A wedding day is structured, and structure gives a camera a great deal to work with: a walk down an aisle, a first look, a speech, a dance. The night before has none of that. It is a long, shapeless evening of small groups forming and dissolving.
That means the pictures are made of different material. Reactions rather than events. Somebody leaning across a table. A hand on a shoulder in passing. Two people who have just been introduced discovering that they get along. We tend to watch the edges of a room on nights like this, because the middle is usually just people eating.
The light problem of an evening event
Here is the practical difficulty. These gatherings almost always start late in the day and run into the dark, which is the hardest condition there is. Restaurant lighting is dim and often unkind in colour. Fairy lights look beautiful to the eye and give a camera very little to work with. Candles are lovely and cover a very small area.
A few things genuinely help, and they cost nothing:
- Start earlier than feels necessary. Half an hour of daylight at the beginning is worth more than any amount of clever work afterwards.
- Put the drinks table where the light is. People gather where the drinks are, so the position of that table decides where the good frames happen.
- Sit outside if the weather allows. A long table under trees in the last of the sun is the easiest situation there is to photograph.
- Warm light beats bright light. If the venue has dimmers, warm and low reads better in a photograph than cold and even.
- Think about the power. If load-shedding lands mid-evening, know which part of the room stays lit and let people drift there.
Weather, and the South African outdoor evening
An outdoor dinner the night before is worth planning for, and worth having an alternative for. On the Highveld in summer a storm can build through the afternoon, arrive fast, clear quickly and leave a beautiful washed-out evening behind it. In the Cape, wind is the more likely disruption, and a south-easter will take a table setting apart while everybody is still admiring it.
None of that needs to ruin anything. Guests forgive a move indoors far more easily than they forgive standing in a gale. What matters for the photographs is that the alternative space has been looked at in advance, so that nobody ends up eating under a single fluorescent strip.
The people to photograph while you can
If you want a practical reason to care about this evening, here it is. It is the easiest opportunity of the whole weekend to get relaxed pictures with the people who matter most to you.
Grandparents are often at their best the night before and tired by the wedding reception. Small children are awake, fed and reasonably behaved, which they will not be late the following night. Friends from far away are present and not yet absorbed into the crowd. A quiet ten minutes with each of those groups, at the beginning of the evening, is worth more than an hour of chasing them the next day.
Speeches, the night before
Plenty of families move some of the speaking to this evening, and there is a good argument for it. A smaller room means a speaker does not have to perform. Somebody who would freeze in front of a very large crowd can manage a table of thirty. And it takes weight off the wedding reception, which is often carrying more toasts than it can comfortably hold.
Whoever is photographing should be watching the listeners as much as the speaker. A parent's face while their child is being talked about is usually the frame that matters, and it happens once.
What it does to the wedding day
There is a difference that shows up in the photographs the following day, and it is not subtle. Guests who met each other the night before arrive at a ceremony already talking. The room warms up faster. The first hour of a reception, which is often slow while people settle, starts somewhere further along.
For the two of you, the effect is simpler still. Having seen everybody the night before, you walk into your own wedding with less to do. You have already greeted the ones who travelled and heard the news you needed to hear. What is left is the day itself.
The night before asks nothing of you photographically. Start it while there is still light, sit where you can see people rather than where the view is best, and spend the first half hour with the ones you will barely reach tomorrow. The pictures that come out of an evening like that tend to be the warmest of the whole weekend, precisely because nobody was thinking about them.
