Destination wedding

A wedding in Germany planned from abroad has one legal peculiarity that rebuilds the whole day around it: only a civil ceremony at a Standesamt is legally binding. A church or humanist ceremony has no legal effect of its own, which means most couples have two events rather than one — a short appointment at a registry office, and the ceremony their guests actually attend. For non-residents the registry office also requires documents that can take months to assemble, and a fair number of couples conclude that marrying legally at home and holding the ceremony here is simpler.

That is a question for the Standesamt and not for a photographer, but it changes the shape of the day entirely, so it belongs in the first conversation rather than the last. The rest is logistics that work better over video than over email: a location walk-through, a running order, and the hour the ceremony should start given the month and which way the venue faces. Twelve hours on the day, an hour of welcome drinks the evening before, six hundred edited photographs and a gallery within three weeks.

Where in Germany you marry shapes the logistics more than the photographs. We work in Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart and Leipzig, and in Heidelberg, Dresden, the Black Forest and around Lake Constance. Palace gardens and other state-run sites can charge their own fees for photography, and those are itemised in the quote so that nothing turns up unannounced on the day. If most of your guests are flying in, the welcome-drinks hour the evening before is where the frames of people seeing each other again tend to happen, because a wedding day on a timetable rarely leaves room for them.

To start, send the date, the region and a rough guest count through the form. The reply comes by phone or email, and a first call is arranged at an hour that works across your time zone. The fixed price is confirmed in writing before anything is booked, no deposit is asked for a quote, and anything that would change it — extra hours, a second photographer, faster delivery — is stated first. The photographs are yours for private use, including sending a gallery link to guests back home. Anyone attending who would rather not appear should have an easy way to say so, and the invitation is the simplest place for it.