Note: Photographers’ Friday is a weekly blog series directed toward professional photographers, and in some instances, serious amateur photographers. All Photographers’ Friday blog posts will assume that readers have a basic working knowledge of digital SLR cameras, but if you’re left with questions or don’t understand any of the information, don’t hesitate to ask. We love e-mails!

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Earlier this year, as we rode to her ceremony, one of my brides laughed to me, “You need to raise your prices and start calling yourself a wedding planner, too, because that’s what you’re already doing!”

Last year, the father of one bride told me, “I don’t know how we would have pulled this wedding off without you and Danny orchestrating things.”

In both situations, I felt very honored and humbled. But I didn’t feel as though I had done anything out of the ordinary — I had done what I knew I needed to in order to successfully complete the job I’d been hired to do.I firmly believe that successfully shooting a wedding means doing a lot more work that shooting the wedding. It means lots of prep time discussing plans with the couple, finding just the right spots for portraits, corresponding with other vendors who are involved, and much, much more. If there isn’t a wedding planner — not a venue coordinator, but a full-blown wedding planner — overseeing the wedding, I also firmly believe that it means the photographer has to help the couple with their wedding day timeline.

Even if there is a wedding planner involved, I think wedding photographers should want to. Think about it: If there isn’t a clear, logical, generous timeline to follow, what wedding professional’s work is going to suffer the most? Not the cake artist. Not the musicians. Certainly not the calligrapher.

If we’re going to photograph a wedding to the best of our ability, that means we need to set ourselves — and our couples — up for success. Creating timelines might not be the most exciting part of a wedding photographer’s job, but for me, it’s essential to ensuring I give myself the most opportunity to create beautiful portraits and capture candid moments, and ensuring I help facilitate a wedding day that is as chill and unstressed as possible for my couples. It’s also proven to be one of the parts of my job that my clients appreciate the very most.

So if you’re a wedding photographer and you’re not proactively creating timelines for your couples, I have a challenge for you: Try it, and see if you don’t have better pictures and happier couples as a result.

~ Laura