How to take good photos at a wedding as a guest

Somebody at this wedding is being paid to photograph it, and they are better at it than you. That is the good news, because it frees you from taking the photographs they are already taking.

What follows is not a photography course. It is the short list of things that make a phone photograph at a wedding better, most of which are decisions about where you stand rather than what you press.

How to take good photos at a wedding as a guest: stop duplicating the professional

The single biggest improvement is choosing a different subject. During the ceremony, the vows and the ring and the kiss are being covered by somebody with a long lens who has been standing in the right place since the music started. Your version of that frame, taken from row nine at maximum zoom over a stranger's shoulder, will never be the one anybody keeps.

Turn around instead. Photograph the row you are sitting in. Photograph the groom's father watching. Photograph the children at the back who have stopped pretending to behave. Those are frames the professional physically cannot take, because they are at the front facing the other way, and they are the ones the couple has never seen before.

The same logic runs all evening. When everyone is watching the first dance, look at the people watching. When the speeches happen, the speaker is covered and the table listening is not.

Where to stand, and where not to

Stay in your seat during the ceremony. Leaning into the aisle for a better angle puts your arm, and often your whole torso, into the photograph the couple paid for, and it is the single most common way a guest ruins a frame without ever knowing it. If the couple has asked for phones away entirely, that is a decision worth respecting for the length of the ceremony and no longer.

At the reception the rules relax and the good positions change. Get low for anything involving children. Get close for anything involving hands. Stand with the light behind you rather than behind your subject, which for an outdoor summer wedding means keeping the sea at your back for most of the afternoon. We wrote about the etiquette side of all this separately, and about what an unplugged ceremony actually asks of you.

Change these on your phone before you arrive

All of this takes two minutes in the car and none of it can be done once the dancing starts.

• Clean the lens. A thumbprint is the reason your evening photographs look hazy, and a shirt is enough to fix it. This is not a joke setting, it is the biggest single improvement available to anybody.
• Turn the flash off and leave it off. A phone flash reaches about two metres, flattens everything it hits and lights nothing behind it. A dark warm photograph looks like the room. A flashed one looks like a police report.
• Turn the grid on. It costs nothing and it stops the horizon tilting, which is the difference between a photograph somebody keeps and one they scroll past.
• Check you have space. Being full at ten at night is how people miss the end of the evening, and the end of the evening is the good part.
• Take one photograph of the couple early. Everyone assumes there will be a better moment later and for a lot of guests there is not.

The photographs nobody else is taking

There is a short list of moments that reliably go unrecorded at every wedding, and a guest is the only person in a position to catch them.

The half hour before the ceremony, while people arrive and find each other outside. The couple's parents when the couple is not in the room. Your own table, all of it, once, while everybody is still sitting down and looking reasonable. The bit after the formal photographs when the group breaks up and starts laughing at itself. And the last hour, long after the photographer's contracted time has run out and the only cameras left are in pockets.

None of those need skill. They need somebody to notice, and the professional cannot be in two places at once.

Three situations that catch everybody out

Almost every bad wedding photograph on a phone comes from one of three situations, and all three have a fix that takes a second.

The first is an outdoor ceremony with the sun behind the couple, which happens at nearly every summer wedding because that is where the view is. Your phone exposes for the bright sky and turns the two people you are photographing into silhouettes. Tap the screen on their faces before you shoot. That one tap tells the camera which part of the frame it is supposed to get right, and it is the difference between a photograph and a shape.

The second is the reception once the lights go down. Phones handle low light by holding the shutter open a fraction longer, which means anything moving smears. Do not chase the dance floor. Photograph people who are sitting, or wait for the half second at the end of a movement when somebody is briefly still. And keep the flash off, which is worth repeating because the temptation is strongest exactly here.

The third is the group selfie, where the arm holding the phone is nearest the lens and everybody else recedes into the distance looking small. Hand the phone to somebody standing two metres away instead. It takes five seconds, it includes the person who was holding it, and it is the only version of that photograph anybody will keep.

Then actually give them to the couple

This is where almost everybody fails, and it is the reason most guest photographs are never seen by the people in them. You take forty good frames, you mean to send them, the week gets away from you and they stay on your phone until the phone is replaced.

If the couple has set up a shared gallery, upload before you leave the venue. It takes a minute at the table and it is the only moment you are certain to remember. If they have not, send them within the week and send the originals rather than a screenshot, because a screenshot of a photograph is a quarter of the photograph. The couple will not see the professional gallery for another month or two, so yours arrive when there is nothing else to look at.

Nobody remembers who took the sharpest photograph at a wedding. They remember who sent them the one of their grandmother laughing.