We’ve been photographing weddings in Wisconsin for close to twenty years, and the questions couples ask us have barely changed. When should we get married. How do we find a place that isn’t booked out three years. Do we need a videographer. Is a first look going to ruin the aisle moment. What do we do about my mom and my dad being in the same room.
We’ve answered most of those in writing at one point or another, usually the week after a wedding where the question came up. What we’ve never done is put them in the order you’d actually need them. So that’s what this is: everything on this site that helps someone plan a Wisconsin wedding, arranged from “we just got engaged” to “it’s 4pm on the day and the light is doing something.”
Most of it applies to anyone getting married here. Some of it is specific to working with photographers like us, who spend the day watching instead of arranging. We’ll say which is which as we go.
Before you book anything
The first real decision is when, and in Wisconsin that decision carries more weight than it does in most states. A September Saturday and a March Saturday are two different weddings, and the venues that are magic in one are a problem in the other. We wrote an honest season-by-season take on the best time of year to get married in Wisconsin, including the parts nobody puts in the brochure: the heat in July, the bugs at dusk in June, how early the light goes in October, and why late winter is better than its reputation.
Date first, then place, then the people who’ll be there working. That order saves the most backtracking.
Finding the place
We’ve shot in barns, state parks, church basements, art museums, a summer camp, somebody’s grandmother’s front yard, and a hotel where Lombardi held his first press conference. Those aren’t interchangeable, and the right one usually comes down to guest count and how much of the day you want to run yourselves.
Start broad with our photographer’s guide to the best Wisconsin wedding venues, then narrow by the kind of day you’re picturing. If it’s small, the best intimate wedding venues in Wisconsin covers places that feel right with forty people rather than cavernous. If you want water, Wisconsin lake wedding venues worth knowing about. If you want it outdoors and cheap, our planning guide to Wisconsin state park weddings works through fourteen parks with permits, shelter costs, and what each one actually gives you, and the micro wedding version handles the smaller end.
Two other paths worth knowing about. Renting a summer camp for a Wisconsin wedding gets you a whole weekend with your people instead of six hours. That changes a wedding more than any decor decision will. Our roundup of camp venues lists the ones we’ve worked. And if there’s family land in the picture, how to turn family land into a venue is the one to read early, because a backyard wedding is not a cheaper wedding. It’s a wedding where you’re also the venue.
Choosing a photographer
This is the part we know best and the part couples are given the worst information about. Photography is one of the few things you’re buying that you can’t evaluate until months after the event, so most of the advice out there is about price and portfolio. Those are the two easiest things to fake.
The place to start is our guide to wedding photography styles, because the word “candid” gets used by photographers who pose every frame, and knowing the difference saves you from hiring the wrong person well. From there, how to choose a wedding photographer, what we’d tell a friend is the questions we’d ask if we were the ones hiring, and the style quiz gets you to an answer in about two minutes if you’d rather not read.
If documentary is where you land, what to expect when you work with a candid wedding photographer is worth reading before you book, not after. It covers what your gallery will feel like, what we will and won’t ask you to do, and the tradeoffs, since there are real ones.
On money, how much wedding photography actually costs breaks down what sits behind the number. Our photography FAQ handles the rest: hours, second shooters, turnaround, prints, what happens if it rains.
Building the rest of the team
We spend twelve hours a day standing next to your other vendors, and we walk past the food tent about forty times. That’s a vantage point couples don’t have and reviews don’t capture.
The Wisconsin wedding vendors we’d actually recommend is our running list, built on two things: are they excellent at the work, and are they good to have around when the day goes sideways. It splits by region into La Crosse and the Driftless, Madison and south central, and Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin. Every name we haven’t personally worked a wedding with says so.
Two vendor decisions get their own posts. Wedding videography in Wisconsin is written by people who don’t shoot video and have no reason to sell you any, including the DIY camcorder options and what the numbers really look like. And hiring someone to run your wedding day is the single line item we’d defend hardest, because the alternative is that the job falls to your mother, your maid of honor, or you.
If you’re curious about the stop motion films we make, here’s what one is and why we make them the way we do.
How the day itself runs
Once the big pieces are booked, planning turns into a question of hours, and this is where a documentary photographer will ask for different things than a traditional one. We’re not looking for a slot to stage portraits in. We’re looking for enough unhurried time that people forget we’re there.
Start with how long each part of the day actually takes. It’s the real numbers for getting ready, family photos, the ceremony, a receiving line and dancing, plus the trick of building the whole day backward from sunset. It’s the same guidance we send our own couples.
Our guide to wedding day light is the most useful thing on this list for the timeline, and it does more than help the photos. Where the sun is at 4pm decides whether your guests are squinting through your vows or comfortable, and it’s a free decision if you make it early enough.
The first look is the other lever. It isn’t for everyone and we’ve never pushed it on anyone, but it changes the shape of the afternoon: photos done before the ceremony, cocktail hour with your guests instead of behind a barn. The aisle moment survives it. We’ve watched that happen a few hundred times.
Choosing your wedding party belongs here too, more than it belongs in the early planning stage. How many people stand up with you changes the morning, the group photos, and who’s missing from cocktail hour, and it’s worth deciding on purpose rather than by addition.
The family photo list is the other place a timeline quietly breaks. It has the ten groupings we send our own couples, what each extra one costs you in minutes, and how to handle divorced parents, toddlers, and the person who calls out the names.
And the rehearsal dinner is underrated, mostly because it’s the one night everyone you love is in town and nobody has a job to do yet.
The part nobody plans for
Somewhere in month five, planning stops being logistics. You’ll have a fight about money, or about your families, or about a guest list that started at 90 and is now at 160 and neither of you knows who added the last thirty.
We coach couples as volunteers when we’re not shooting, and what wedding planning fights are actually about is the post we send people most often. Its companion, when a parent wants to run your wedding day, covers the person those fights are usually really about, including the far more common version who isn’t taking over at all, just worrying out loud for eleven hours. The short version is that planning a wedding surfaces the same handful of things marriages argue about for decades. That makes it useful rather than ominous.
The last one is less advice and more the reason we do any of this. Planning a wedding day worth being at is about making a memory on purpose, and about how the days that bond people are almost never the most expensive ones.
When the weather doesn’t cooperate
A few different things can happen to an outdoor wedding here, and each one is a different problem with a different answer. Lumping them together is how most planning advice gets this wrong, so we wrote one post on each.
Wind is mostly a decor problem, until October, when it becomes a venue decision. It takes down more outdoor weddings than rain does and almost nobody plans for it. Heat is really a question about one twenty-five minute stretch, because the ceremony is the only part of the day your guests can’t fix for themselves. And rain causes less trouble than deciding about rain does, which is why the fix is a call time and a person to make it rather than a tent.
If you only read one, read the one that matches the season you booked.
Where to start
If you’re at the very beginning, read the season post and one venue roundup, and go look at a place in person. Everything else can wait a month.
If you’ve got a date and a venue, the light guide and the coordinator post will do more for your day than anything else here.
And if you’re trying to figure out whether we’re the right photographers for you, the candid photography post is the honest version. We’d rather you read it and decide we’re not, than book us and find out in the gallery.
