Hacker News Reader

Comment by physicsguy | Hacker News Reader

This gets asked at basically every wedding I've been to in the UK i.e. there is a professional photographer, please don't take photos of the bride and groom in the church and it still gets ignored. At my own wedding, one of the guests (not even someone invited to the whole day, just a neighbour of my wife's parents who knew her growing up) is leaning out of the aisle with their phone taking photos ruining a load of photos.

It's incredibly frustrating. I also think it's really strange that when something happens in public, the default isn't to look to see if the person isn't OK anymore, it's to pull out a camera phone and start filming.

View on HN

The thing I've seen at a few weddings recently is that right after the processional, they have a period of like 30 seconds where they allow everyone to take a picture of the couple, then phones away for the rest of the ceremony. I'm sure it's not 100% effective, but it does seem to scratch the itch for most people. I think also by calling such explicit attention to the rule at the beginning of the ceremony, it makes it seem ever more rude to violate it later.

I noticed you said “the whole day” I went a wedding once where the bride was from the UK. They said it was a “British style” wedding. It was almost exactly like an American wedding except that everything lasted twice as long (cocktail hour was 2 hours etc…).

I could never find out if this was a common thing in the UK or not.

I believe that it's uncommon in the USA to invite people to part of a wedding, but it's common in the UK. "Not someone invited to the whole day" implies a second-tier guest, who's been invited to the ceremony and the after-party, but not to the meal.

The ceremony is technically open to the public in any case, usually.

Usually it would be either the full day (ceremony, meal and ‘evening party’ which we commonly call the reception) or just the reception. No one is being asked to skip the middle part of the event.

Less than 20% of weddings are religious (and a smaller subset of this will be in churches), and I don’t really hear of anyone just turning up at the ceremony of someone they don’t know.

> Less than 20% of weddings are religious (and a smaller subset of this will be in churches)

That's a likely a fair underestimate because many religious marriages aren't legally valid because of various requirements that the Church of England doesn't have to follow as the state church. In Catholic churches for e.g. they need to register the building, then either appoint the priest as an authorised person or get a registrar to come to every ceremony as in a civil wedding. They do usually do this but most non-Christian religions don't bother with this at all and so the couple end up just having a civil ceremony first and the religious one after.

I've seen posts from wedding photographers who would pass around cheap/older cameras to guests. This lets people scratch the shutterbug itch while avoiding all the problems that come with a room full of people trying to get a shot.

> please don't take photos of the bride and groom in the church and it still gets ignored

Counterpoint

I've never known such requests be ignored here in Blighty. Ditto requests not to upload photos to social media.

Unrelated to this post but what does it mean when a person isn't invited to the whole day?

I've been to weddings that had an "open" ceremony and a closed reception. This has generally been at a church, where the wedding itself is announced to the whole church community, but then the reception is a more limited number of family and friends.

More commonly though, I've been to weddings where they had a small private ceremony (just the couple, officiant, and a handful of family), and then a large reception for everyone in the evening.

They're not invited to the ceremony & wedding breakfast (which often isn't actually breakfast), just the evening reception. Unlike US weddings, the evening event is generally not the most expensive part of the affair.

In weddings in the U.K. (or at least in England) anyone can attend a wedding - legally they have to be open.

It’s therefore not uncommon if it’s local for more distant friends of family, neighbours, etc. to pop along to the ceremony at invitation of the couple or their parents as a result, but not to be invited to the party part. Sometimes older guests will just come to ceremony too.

What the fu-

That's an insane legal requirement. I'll do the legal wedding in the most unceremonious, quickest manner possible, and then have my real ceremony in privacy and not tell anyone about it.

It's largely historic these days, there's been various proposals to reform it and other mad rules (e.g. can't get married outside, can't get married after 6pm) but it's not really viewed as high priority.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com