A wedding timeline that actually works

Two things you do not get to move

Your auspicious time is fixed by somebody else, and the sun goes down at six. Near the equator it is six all year, give or take twenty minutes, which is a genuinely useful thing about getting married in Sri Lanka, and almost nobody plans around it.

Photographers in London build the whole day backwards from a sunset that moves by four hours between winter and summer. You do not have that problem. You have the opposite one: your good light is short, it is always in the same place, and if you are still doing family groups at six you have spent it.

Put twenty minutes at quarter past five and defend it

That is the only slot in the day I will ever ask you for. Twenty minutes, the two of you, somewhere near where everyone else is. Not a location shoot. Not a drive. Twenty minutes.

It gets moved or eaten more often than anything else on a running order, usually because the meal started late, and it is the one thing that cannot be recovered later because the light is simply gone.

The three places timelines actually break

Hair and makeup started too late. Family groups had nobody in charge of them. And nobody costed the drive between the ceremony and the hotel at the time of day you are actually doing it, which in Colombo is not the time Google Maps thinks it is.

None of those are photography problems. All three land on the photographer anyway. Decide each one in advance, in writing, and give one named person responsibility.

Family groups: eight, not thirty

Eight groupings take about fifteen minutes. Thirty takes an hour, and the hour comes straight out of your own reception. Write the list, cap it at eight, and pick a loud aunt who knows everyone by sight to call the names. Not your mother. Your mother should be in the photographs.

Leave a hole in the schedule

Put twenty minutes after the meal with nothing in it at all. Something will happen in it. In my experience it is usually better than whatever was scheduled on either side.