Being a wedding photographer means you interact with many people, including the bride, groom, and their families, and travel to new destinations. However, a wedding photographer’s job is not as fun as it seems. There are numerous moments when these folks think about changing their professions.
Wedding photographers witness real bridezilla and groomzilla moments and many other surprising instances behind the scenes of taking the perfect shot.
Some wedding photographers opened up on Reddit about the worst moments caught on camera.
Most of them had no idea they would witness something like that.
Comments have been edited for clarity and grammar.
u/TouchToLose: The wedding was on a pier. The couple and the planner kept checking the radar on their phones for the rain to decide whether to do the wedding on the pier or take it inside.
I looked at the pier and said to them, “I don’t know what your radar says, but those are rain clouds.” They make the call to do the ceremony on the pier anyway.
About three minutes into the ceremony, it starts to rain. Out of nowhere, a man appears with a heart-shaped wicker box.
I always ask the couple if there is anything different about the wedding I should know.
They never said anything to me about this, so I was caught off guard. Cool. Fine.
I just keep shooting.
He hands the box to the bride. She opens it up, and there are two doves in there. Ok.
Pretty cool. I’ve heard of a dove release but have never actually seen one. But these doves were NOT feeling it.
They just sat there and were like, yeah, no, it’s the beach, and it’s raining.
The bride looks at the bird handler. Back at the birds. Shakes the box.
Nothing. He motions for her to scoot them out of the box. She reaches in there, and they immediately flee the box.
They both fly directly into her face.
I shot in burst mode and got a pretty wild sequence of shots. One of the birds gets caught in her weave, and she shakes her head while swatting at the bird to free it.
Then, the bottom falls out. It was pouring rain and heavy winds.
The officiant continues like nothing is happening—zero sense of urgency.
People are just getting up and heading inside. One of the family members gets up in the middle of the aisle and starts screaming and chanting, “JUST SAY I DO! KISS!”
They do, and it starts raining even harder.
I backpedaled down the pier as they ran through the rain. The shots of them running through the rain are beautiful.
The whole wedding was a complete mess. The couple told me that I was the only thing that went right on their wedding day, that looking at my pictures made them happy, and that the pictures made the awful day look beautiful.
u/BioregenerativeLamp:
The ceremony starts, and everything is going well enough.
I had to be ready all the time in case the couple called me or something happened, so I was constantly close and scouting for them.
Sometimes, I would see some good moments or have some idea, and I would ask them if they wanted a picture, so I’d take it.
At some point, the couple is no longer inside, so I go around to look for them. I spotted them outside in the back of the place, which was a beautiful patio with decorations and all that thing.
They are just close, talking side by side with heads slightly tilted towards each other, and I think, “Aww yeah, this is going to be a great pic,” and I try to come closer without them looking.
I take the picture after zooming in, and only then do they simultaneously notice me, and I notice that they have the saddest faces I’ve seen in a bride and groom.
I ask if everything is okay, and they say yes, so I let it go. “Not my place,” I said, but when the party was almost over, the groom approached me, and in the middle of the conversation, he said that the ceremony was so exhausting for them because they knew almost nobody there.
It turns out the mother of the groom “had” to have a wedding for his son and orchestrated the whole thing without them knowing, invited her friends and family, and then told them that they would have to come from where they lived (which was far away) to their wedding.
That was on top of the fact that the son wasn’t on good terms with his mother, and the bride hated her.
Apparently, the mother was very abusive and manipulative.
The only person the groom knew was his brother, who got very drunk as soon as the ceremony allowed him to, and the bride knew nobody.
Later, looking at the photos, I noticed that when the two were together alone, they looked lovely and happy, but their warmth would slightly die when the mother was present in the picture, but that might be my confirmation bias. I don’t know.
I remember that the groom said, “I probably know you more than I know most people at this party,” and had me sit down, eat cake and drink with him and the bride, and wait out the rest of the people.
I didn’t send them that picture of them, although I always wondered if I should have. They were very intimate and enduring something together, and it was a perfect picture outside the emotion.
u/EmptyCupMedia: I filmed a guy pushing a baby carriage.
The two sides of the family were not fans of one another, and I filmed a nice moment where a gentleman was talking to a baby in a push carriage.
The baby reached for his beer bottle, and the guy let the baby touch it. Well, the father of the kid grabbed the beer bottle and chucked it down the field, then shouted at the guy, “You don’t give beer to kids!”
So, the beer guy made a mean face and shoved the carriage slightly. I got it all on tape from about 20 feet away.
I even got a cutaway of the smashed beer bottle the guy threw.
u/Motogirlmx:
Apparently, he gets bloody noses when he gets nervous. They stopped all photos and got emergency Sprite soda cleaning done in the hotel/ceremony location.
I was asked to delete all photos and keep the situation from the bride’s mother. The bride was surprisingly understanding!
Two hours of pre-ceremony photos were cut short, but the stain was removed quickly enough to not be noticeable for the ceremony.
After review, I had a perfect mid-sneeze shot with red drops flying out of the groom’s face.
It’s sad to see that one edited.
u/plopploptoot: There was this aunt of the bride or groom (not sure which) who wore a dress that I’m pretty sure was meant to be a long blouse.
She was dancing in the middle of a circle of people at the reception, so I peered in between two people and snapped photos of her.
I didn’t realize until I had gotten home and pulled them up on my computer that her “dress” was bouncing up when she jumped and exposed her privates.
This was a wedding that I shot for an event company, so the way that works is that I just turn over the raw files to the company, and an editor edits them and delivers the album to the client.
I forgot to warn them about the inappropriate photos, but you’d think they would notice. Nope. I wound up seeing the couple’s final album in the system after it had already been emailed to them, and lo and behold, the photos are in there.
u/[deleted]: My friend is a photographer.
He does weddings. He got punched in the face by the groom because the groom decided that the photographer was “taking too many photos of the bride.” Weddings seem to bring out the worst in humanity.
u/OfficialAnorak:
She then slipped, knocked her shoulder right onto the concrete, and her shoulder got dislocated. One of the bridesmaids just saw the dislocated shoulder of the bride and passed out right onto the husband.
It’s tough to suppress your laughter when you see a bride holding her shoulder and the groom having a quite corpulent lady lying on his back.
u/Motogirlmx: It was a large Catholic ceremony, and the groomsmen had written “HELP ME” in bright white at the bottom of the groom’s shoes as a prank.
When he knelt for the ceremony, the entire church could see it.
Snickers and laughs throughout the somber ceremony.
The bride was FURIOUS and wouldn’t speak to any of them after she found out for the rest of the day. We were asked to photoshop it out of the final album. Probably mean but also hilarious.
And another—not a photo issue, but the groom spilled an entire pint of beer down the DJ’s main Bose speaker at the beginning of the reception.
Music goes down with no way to continue playing.
The bride immediately bursts into tears and spends the next hour in the bathroom crying. The groomsmen come to the rescue by backing a pickup truck up to the open reception doors and plugging in an iPod – pre-smartphone days.
u/mytevesen: I was filming a wedding ceremony for some friends this summer. The bride’s stepfather was sitting in the front row.
She had already warned me he could cause trouble, so I noted where he sat before the ceremony started.
He sat down in the front row and promptly fell asleep.
He slept for the entire 20-minute ceremony. I was so angry on the bride’s behalf. Who sits on the front row and can’t stay awake for the few minutes the ceremony lasts?
I managed to avoid him in the final edit, thank God.
u/angry_baboon: It was really sunny and hot, and I think the bride didn’t eat or drink for several hours because she was nervous.
The ceremony was outdoors, and I had to take a picture of the couple with all the guests standing in front of the wedding arch after the ceremony finished.
So, people start gathering around the couple. There are 80 guests, so it takes some time to ensure everyone is visible in the picture.
Finally, when everything is perfect, and I say, “Look into the camera and smile!” the bride closes her eyes and collapses.
The groom caught her right before she fell to the ground. It was so hot that day, and she was probably dehydrated, so she fainted!
And I captured that moment in my picture.
u/invisiblebody: When I was twelve, I was at a wedding with those disposable cameras on the table. The wedding was in a mansion’s backyard and got cleared away for the reception right there.
I walked around using the camera to take pictures of flowers, bees, and butterflies, and not a single photo was wedding-related.
I had totally forgotten myself and didn’t realize what I did until I got told to put the camera back. I mistakenly thought they were for us to take home.
Whoops.
u/soldatbullfrog: I did freelance photography for a while after I graduated high school. I got hired, along with another photographer, by a company to shoot a wedding.
This company instructed us to get as many candid photos as possible per the client’s request. The other photographer was female, and we split up during the preparation phase.
I hung out with the groom and groomsmen, and she went with the bride and bridesmaids.
It became clear that the groomsmen had been drinking for a while when I arrived, and that did not stop. For the groomsmen, getting ready took only a few minutes. Put on tuxes, boom, done.
So we had a few hours to hang out while the bride got her hair/makeup done.
The groomsmen took full advantage of this period to drink more. I got a few good shots during this, as the friendship between these guys was evident. Unfortunately, they drank a bit too much.
Once the time for the ceremony came, they could barely walk straight, and the groom was in the worst of them.
I broke away from them to get my position for the ceremony and let the other photographer know what a mess this would be.
She told me the bride had expressed concern that the groomsmen would drink too much before the ceremony. We both braced ourselves for what was to come.
The ceremony started, and the groomsmen came up the aisle in a parade. The groom stumbled and almost took a knee at one point.
Then, the bridesmaids came in, and watching their anger and concern bloom on their faces as they took in the groomsmen standing unsteadily on the dais was hilarious in hindsight but felt like a slow-motion train wreck at the moment.
Then the bride entered the church, and even through the veil, you could tell she was vacillating between fury and sadness.
She stepped up to the little platform, and in the silent moment between the music fading away just before the pastor could begin speaking, one of the groomsmen ripped a horrendously loud fart.
The bride’s face fell, and half of the people in attendance started laughing while the other half let out a breathless, disgusted gasp.
The groom barely stifled a laugh, and one of the other groomsmen turned and punched the farter in the arm.
It was as if these guys had no clue where they were or how important the event was to everyone but them, apparently. The other photographer and I did our best to get shots and just do the job we were getting paid to do.
It was difficult to get any close-ups of the bride or groom as the bride settled on furious facial expressions for the remainder of the ceremony, and the groom could barely focus his eyes on his bride. She uttered her vows through gritted teeth, and he slurred through his while slowly rocking back and forth.
The reception only spiraled out from there.
The groom threw up on the floor before the cake-cutting and was ensconced somewhere.
After one of the groomsmen struck out with the bridesmaids, he set his sights on the other photographer. Eventually, our agreed-upon time ran out, and we left. I handed off all of my RAW files to the company that hired me and wished them luck editing that travesty.
u/Bonzaigiraffe: We got married in a friend’s front garden I had helped put together as a teenager.
Just as we got to the vows, you could hear people sniffling, just about to cry, when the tell-tale sound of an ice cream van started to build.
It got louder and louder until it abruptly stopped. The driver noticed what they were approaching and shut off the music at the property line to the next-door neighbor.
Silence as they crept by the house. Then, as soon as they hit the next home full blast again, “Do your ears hang low…” Everyone burst out laughing.
The driver should have returned 10 minutes later because they would have made a lot of money.
u/Nelly0112: Not me, but my buddy was the videographer for a wedding. During the ceremony, they had candles lining the aisle, and the bride’s mother decided to get closer so she could get a better picture.
While she was taking pictures, she started walking backward. Well, she walked backward right into one of the candle holders and knocked it over right into someone’s lap.
Commence chaos!
The guy jumps up, trying to put out the fire that’s now in his lap. His wife starts screaming at the woman. It took about 20 minutes to get everything calmed down.
The wedding went on as planned afterward.
And yes, it was all caught on camera. The bride insisted it be cut out of the final video. So, my buddy put it on a separate tape for us all to laugh at later.
u/VealIsNotAVegetable: Not a photographer, but ours caught a truly perfect moment.
In the foreground, I leaned forward to kiss my wife’s hand in a lovely romantic gesture, perfectly framing the bridesmaid in the background.
The background—a lovely view of the small cove we’re in, with one of the bridesmaids bent over to look at something in the tide pool, accidentally exposing her bottom to the camera.
u/[deleted]: I was helping a friend, who is a wedding photographer, take shots of everyone else at the wedding.
When it was time for the signing, my friend had a problem with his camera, so I took over for a few minutes. The bride and groom were sitting at the table, signing the book.
The groom, best man, and ushers all wore kilts. I had been paying attention to the happy couple, but for a couple of photos, I knelt to get some more eye-level shots.
Little did I know that I had accidentally taken photos of the groom’s private parts exposed because of his outfit.
I didn’t notice until I reviewed the images later on the laptop.
u/baviddowie23: I was a wedding photographer in Las Vegas at several hotels and downtown wedding chapels. I’ve got so many of these stories. Here’s a fun one.
On a Monday, I got booked to shoot the wedding.
On Wednesday, the hotel called me to cancel because the bride backed out.
On Thursday, the hotel called to rebook me because the wedding is back on. It was the same groom but a different bride.
On Friday, I shot the wedding with the new bride, who was around 19 years old (the groom was early twenties). It’s clear they barely know each other.
The bride just kept saying, “This is so crazy. I can’t believe I’m doing this.” Neither could I.
Here’s a sad one: An older couple, I’d guess in their forties or fifties. The limo driver calls and tips me off that the bride is being a problem.
She arrives and is extremely rude to the staff, while the groom is apologetic and super nice.
The ceremony starts, and she fast walks down the aisle and doesn’t wait for the groom. The groom sheepishly catches up at the altar.
When it’s her time to say, “I do,” she says, “Yeah, whatever,” in an annoyed tone. The groom says, “I do.” You could cut the tension in the room with a knife.
The minister keeps things on track and finishes the ceremony, and we get to the kiss.
Instead of kissing the groom, she turns her face and gives him her cheek. She then fast-walks back down the aisle, signs the paperwork, and leaves. The groom was in tears.
I never saw them again, and I’m sure it didn’t last.
Here’s another: I would guess the bride was in her seventies, and the groom was in his early twenties.
One side of the chapel was all walkers and oxygen tanks, while the other was intoxicated people in their twenties. I’m pretty sure it was a money grab, but it was notable because, usually, the genders are reversed in these kinds of weddings.
Another fun one: The wedding was at the top of the stratosphere tower. The couple shows up, and the bride is a new-age crystal type, very, let’s say, spiritual, and the groom looks like an 1849 gold miner—rope belt, floppy hat, three teeth, the whole thing.
The bride tells me there would be spirits and angels in the photos, and the reason they got married at the stratosphere is because it’s the closest place to heaven where they could get married.
They were so weird about it and said so many times that they wanted to be with God and go to heaven that the hotel had the dog sniff them before getting on the elevator to go to the top.
We lie and tell them it’s standard practice to have the dogs sniff everyone.
The wedding happens, and they start chanting nonsense words, then proceed to have the grossest kiss I’ve ever seen. It turns out they met that week in AA.
u/Greylings: My mother was a wedding photographer till I was about 18-19, and I helped out on many of them. The one that stands out the most was at a campsite where the wedding and reception were being held.
About halfway through the reception, I hear the groom start laughing maniacally.
I peeked over his way and saw two groomsmen hauling the screaming bride toward the lake.
They threw her into the cold water with her veil and dress still on. When she got out of the water, I genuinely thought she might get furious. Her hair, makeup, and probably the dress were ruined beyond repair.
The fact that the groom laughed and didn’t do anything stuck with me as being a terrible move, even as a teen.
Apparently, she thought so, too, because they didn’t even make it six months.
u/EndlessOcean: The bride was so terrible her mom gave me a $500 tip for not walking out on the event when she was treating everyone (even her now husband) like a bad employee.
She did the whole clicking fingers thing when wanting someone to do something for her, and she berated the DJ for grabbing a sandwich when he’d been there for about 8 hours.
He was told that he should’ve brought his lunch, and she would be taking the cost of the food (like an open buffet style) out of his paycheck. The bride was divorced within three years, but not before having three kids that have stupid names.
u/Past-Independent2575: Wedding photographer from India here. The bride’s mom dissed non-stop about the groom to a couple of our photographers.
She believed that her daughter was too beautiful for the guy they promised her hand to and that she’d rather have him die sooner than see him with her daughter after the wedding.
The bride and the groom had the first dinner separately because the bride wasn’t in the mood to have their reception dinner together.
This one is the final nail in the coffin: post the wedding, when we were about to photograph portraits of the couple, the groom walked up to us saying that he was too tired from the wedding, so it’d be better if we could use the photos from the previous weddings we shot and morph his face on to those and walked away.
They divorced three months later.
u/samprimary: Her three kids from a previous marriage (8, 9, and 12) were screaming, covering themselves in soda, and overturning tables while making extremely hostile, profanity-laden demands for a drivable Hot Wheels car, and escalated to just randomly hitting people with baseball bats.
The entire time, the mom was going, “Haha, aren’t they so crazy? Oh, it’s okay. They just get to express themselves.” The marriage lasted somewhere between four and five months.
u/Portly_pug: When cutting the cake, the bride playfully got some on the groom’s face.
He proceeded to grab a giant chunk and PUNCH her in the face with it, several times hard. She was digging it out from underneath her eyelids, bawling, and her Dad needed to be held back.
EDIT: Many people have been asking, so here is a bit more backstory. My guess as to why people were holding the Dad back was that the groom was in full Marine dress uniform, and they used his sword to cut the cake.
That sword was very much in arms reach of the groom after this happened, so everyone was probably worried something terrible could happen if those two got near each other.
After the incident, it was awkwardly silent as the groom apologized to the family.
If I remember correctly, the groom and the Dad went outside for around 20 minutes, then came back in. The rest of the reception went as planned after that.
u/Pancakes_Whisperer: The wedding was on a golf course. The bride had a vision of her husband driving up on a golf cart to see her for a first look.
He got one look at her from the top of the hill and vaulted the cart, ran down the hill, picked her up, and twirled her around to tell her how gorgeous she was.
We caught it all. It was the best first look ever.
Once he set her down, she straightened herself, looked back at us, and said, “Okay, I don’t want that. Let’s do the golf cart now.” And she sent him back up.
u/Aeri73: The couple had practiced their opening dance, a tango, in a large room, but the wedding venue was a long and narrow, tiny room.
So, one step forward in tango style, three steps ahead, but trampling in place due to guests sitting in their way.
Three steps backward, trampling in place again, to take two steps back to reach the other side guest and start trampling in the area again.
Right in the middle of all this, the kitchen starts bringing out food (they hadn’t served any food before, so this was after complaints from most guests about being hungry).
I have videos and photos of the couple trampling, with no guests watching them. Not even the bride’s mother because she was busy destroying a pack of fries with her back turned to the couple’s opening dance.
u/cheese_shenanigans: There’s the time I went to a destination wedding of a friend. The day before my flight, somebody broke into my hotel room and stole all of my equipment, including two cameras and all of my lenses, everything.
The bride and groom were super chill and still wanted me to photograph the only way I could—with my phone.
It was embarrassing, but luckily, my phone had a decent camera.
But then, while I was trying to take group photos, the bride’s aunt kept stepping in and rearranging people after I had just got them into positions, etc., just trying to take over my shoot so she could get her own photos.
u/lulu125: My first wedding was a small ceremony with a small reception at the couple’s house. We almost finished with posed photos, and the couple went in to grab their dogs for photos (these dogs were their babies). They had closed the dogs in the basement so they wouldn’t get out during the setup.
One of the dogs had fallen through the steps and was severely hurt.
The bride grabbed the bloody, crying dog, and they left in their tux and gown to the vet.
I was stuck at their house with their guests for three hours as we waited for the newlyweds to return. When they did, it was with the news that the dog didn’t make it. The bride’s gown was dirty.
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