In the Pacific Northwest, wedding season is spring to fall and that leaves a few months of downtime. That leaves a lot of time to brainstorm and dream about creating and want to build relationships with other vendors in our area of work. I wanted to give some tips on how to plan a styled shoot, and this is a GREAT time to start planning.

How to Plan a Styled Shoot

Find your Inspiration Piece

This last year, I KNEW I wanted to plan a stylized wedding shoot. I absolutely LOVED the Pantone color of 2015, Marsala, but it was a bit too orange for my liking. After realizing this, I knew that I wanted to use more of a burgundy color and then I had to pick my secondary colors. I scoured Pinterest and knew that I wanted to have some blush and definitely gold accents! When I was shopping one day, I found a perfect set of china that I knew I wanted to be my inspiration piece for my whole shoot! I think this helped SO much when I was planning, and so that’s my first tip. When you start brainstorming, find an inspiration piece! It doesn’t have to be something tangible, like china, but it could be a color scheme, certain flowers, or anything!

Be Specific

As wedding vendors, we know all about brides using words like rustic, or vintage, or Victorian, or elegant. What we don’t always realized is that what “rustic” is to one person, may be something TOTALLY different to the next. Instead of saying you want a elegant, rustic, fun theme, really THINK about what you really want from the shoot. I let my other vendors know that it was going to be rustic, but ONLY because of the venue we used. I wanted our shoot to show brides that you can still have a rustic atmosphere, but you don’t have to use burlap and lace and pearls. I wanted to show them that it can be elegant, and classic. I knew my bride and groom would help with this part as well.

Just ASK!

Planning a styled shoot is STRESSFUL!!! You have so many vendors to contact, make sure they’re on board, make sure you’ve communicated with them what you expect, but first, you have to FIND those vendors! I worked with some amazing vendors with my styled shoot, and all I did was ASK! I found some fellow wedding vendors that I LOVED their work, and I emailed them. I let them know what I was planning, what I was looking for, and what they would get in return for their time and service, and aside from a few that were just swamped with weddings, they said yes!

The next step was making sure everyone was on the same page and that everything would mesh well together. I’ve heard of others that have planned a shoot, thought everyone was on the same page, and then when it all comes together it looks awful! I didn’t want this to be the case with me, so I was thorough when I was dealing with my vendors!

Using Pinterest for Inspiration

When I first started Pinning things to our shared board for the shoot, it was all kind of everywhere. It wasn’t until my florist kind of sat me down and asked me what I really expected the flowers to look like since the pins were kind of confusing. I had some with purples, I had some with bright red, and nothing really fit together. Make sure that your Pinterest Board, or mood board, makes sense to everyone. Don’t just pin everything you see. If there’s something you really like about a pin, make sure you put WHAT you like in the description. This can help everyone out.

Make Sure of Your Timeline

We all work wedding days. We all know that hair and makeup take longer than you think it’s going to. Every. Single. Time. I made the mistake of not remembering this and ended up with only about 10 minutes of light left in the day. We still got some great shots, but I still really wish I would have had more time with my couple. I had some cool things planned that I didn’t get to do because I ran out of light. So definitely coordinate with your vendors. Make sure that everyone knows where to be, what to do, and when they need to do it. This is probably the BIGGEST thing I learned from doing my first styled shoot. As long as others know what you expect, they can do their part, and all you have to worry about is the photos.

Over All

Styled Shoots can be SO much fun. It really is a fun chance that we creatives can get together and create some amazing work. As wedding vendors, it’s a great chance to give our clients wedding inspiration! Oh, and if you plan it right, you can even eat cake after! 😀 Who doesn’t love cake!? 😀

Have you done a styled shoot before? Did you plan it or work with a planner? Do you have any other great tips!?