Baggy Time: The One Piece of Wedding Advice That I Actually Give | Derbyshire wedding photographer Simon Dewey

Published by Guest author on October 19, 2026October 19, 2026

One of two grooms at a wedding looking thrilled to spot a guest in the crowd during the confetti throw - Simon Dewey Photography

A guest article by Derby documentary wedding photographer Simon Dewey. Simon is a member of English Wedding.

I believe the moment is sovereign and whatever’s actually happening is more interesting than anything staged to look like it. You can pose a group and you can direct a shot, but you can’t fake the real thing. It always beats the version someone controlled.

I’ve come to believe this through years of photographing weddings, but it isn’t really about photography. You rarely know which moments in your life are going to matter most until they’re already happening. They’re not the ones you can plan for (and often, there’s no camera present to capture them).

A wedding day doesn’t protect that on its own. Left to itself, a wedding day is a ski slope, not a list. Getting ready, ceremony, photos, meal, speeches, first dance, once you push off, everything gathers momentum in one direction, and a stumble at the top carries all the way to the bottom.

Nobody’s job on the day is to defend the undirected moments. The celebrant is timing the ceremony. The caterer is timing the meal. The DJ is timing the dancefloor. Every one of those is a reasonable thing for someone to be managing, but none of them is managing space for the moment that isn’t on anyone’s list. Without room built in on purpose, the day fills itself with the planned parts, and the unplanned ones don’t get a slot.

Some photographers step into the day to fix that. They’ll organise the confetti line, help keep things to schedule, gently direct where people should be. I purposefully don’t. The moment I start directing, I stop being someone who’s just there and become someone people are looking to for approval, for what to do next, whether they’re doing it right. Once that happens, the day isn’t just being observed anymore. The camera has become the thing the day runs around and that’s the opposite of everything I’m trying to do. (Because, as we kicked off with, the moment is sovereign.)

I don’t have a shot list of moments I’m hoping for. The truth of what actually happens on a wedding day is far messier than that. What I’m protecting space for isn’t a plan. It’s the chance for something real to happen that nobody could have scheduled. Your dad’s face mid-speech before he’s composed himself. The five minutes you spend hiding from your own party with a drink and your new spouse. Your gran laughing at something nobody else heard. I’ll be struggling to remember any of it by next week as I’ll be at someone else’s wedding. But you’ll still be looking at that photo in twenty years, and it’ll still mean something. It will tell you things about that person, that moment, that no posed shot will ever do. Not because I planned for it, but because it was real when it happened.

Your wedding day is one of the only times in your life your whole family and closest friends will ever be in one room again. Not for a christening, not for a funeral, for you, celebrating you. Grandparents, oldest friends, new in-laws, all in one place, on one day that moves faster than any day you’ve lived through. Almost everyone I’ve photographed says some version of the same thing afterwards. It went so fast. I barely remember it.

You don’t get another chance at this particular gathering of these particular people. If the day is run so tightly that you’re being moved from one thing to the next without a moment to actually sit with your nan, or stand in a circle of your oldest friends and just breathe it in. That’s why the time matters more than the schedule.

I shot a Jewish wedding recently where I saw this built into the ceremony itself. After the couple are married under the chuppah, tradition requires them to step away together, alone, for around ten minutes. It’s called Yichud, and it isn’t just a nice custom, it’s considered essential to the marriage being complete. No photographs, no guests, just the two of them, before anyone else gets a claim on their attention. I found myself thinking every couple should get a version of this. Not for religious reasons necessarily, but because someone worked out a long time ago that if you don’t protect that time on purpose, it disappears into everything else happening around you.

I have a name for the thing that gives that time a chance. I call it “baggy time”. Room built into the day on purpose, so that when something runs long, or something wonderful happens that nobody scheduled, there’s space for it.

At a recent wedding, hair and makeup ran an hour over. The wedding planner said “This happens at every wedding I do”. I remember thinking that was a strange thing to hear, it was the first time it had happened to me. But I talked to photographer friends and they said… you’ve been so lucky so far!

We ended up squeezing family photos in between speeches at the wedding breakfast.

At another, the bride got nervous before walking down the aisle. The ceremony was delayed half an hour. Everything after it was rushed to try and fit it all in.

Neither was anyone’s fault. Nerves happen. Makeup takes longer than planned for sometimes. A tightly timed day has no room to absorb either of them, so one delay becomes every delay, all the way through to the first dance. And the first thing to go is always the unplanned stuff. The real stuff.

Most of the couples I work with get this instinctively. There’s no spreadsheet. The timeline is loose on purpose, built with space to actually be with people rather than be moved between them.

If you’re planning your day now, don’t fill every minute. Build in more time than you think you need for the things that involve other people. Getting ready, family photos, the walk between venues. A tight schedule looks efficient on paper. It rarely feels that way on the day.

The best weddings aren’t the ones that ran exactly to plan. They’re the ones where there was enough room, when something ran long, or something wonderful happened that nobody scheduled, to actually be there for it.