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Lens & Settings Recommender for Wedding Photography

A wedding day cycles through at least three distinct shooting situations — quiet ceremony, posed portraits, low-light reception — each needing a different starting-point lens and settings.

Lens & Settings Recommender for Wedding Photography

Open the Lens & Settings Recommender

Recommended settings

  • Ceremony: select 'Event' scene type with a long lens and quiet shutter to stay unobtrusive from the back of the aisle.
  • Portraits: select 'Portrait' scene type with the blurred-background look for couple and family shots.
  • Reception: select 'Event' scene type, indoor dim lighting, to get a fast-shutter, higher-ISO baseline for a moving dance floor.

Tips for this niche

  • Re-run the recommender at each transition point in the day rather than carrying one setup across all three situations.
  • Use the handheld toggle honestly at the reception — a slower 'safe' shutter speed assumption there will blur moving guests.

Got your Wedding settings dialed in?

Turn your wedding shoot into ready-to-post captions, hashtags and matching audio — free to try, no signup.

Want the full lesson?

This topic is covered in depth in Lesson 6: Shooting for a Genre.

Example scenario

Moving from the ceremony straight into family formals, re-running the recommender with 'Portrait' and the blurred-background look immediately gives a wider-aperture, closer-focus baseline appropriate for group and couple shots, instead of carrying over the ceremony's longer, narrower setup.

Common mistakes

  • Keeping ceremony settings into the reception. a quiet, longer-lens ceremony setup is close to useless in a dim reception where a faster shutter and different framing are needed.
  • Not distinguishing portraits from candids in the same session. posed portraits can use a slower shutter than candid interactions between the same two settings changes — treat them as different scenes.

FAQ

Should a wedding photographer use one settings baseline for the whole day?
No — ceremony, portraits and reception are different enough scenes (light, distance, subject movement) that each deserves its own quick settings check rather than one carried-over setup.

Guides for this tool, by niche

Lens & Settings Recommender for Portrait PhotographyLens & Settings Recommender for Landscape PhotographyLens & Settings Recommender for Street PhotographyLens & Settings Recommender for Wildlife PhotographyLens & Settings Recommender for Architecture PhotographyLens & Settings Recommender for Sports Photography

Troubleshooting

Why Do I Never Know What Settings to Start With for a New Scene?

Gear guides

Best Lens for Wedding Photography: Focal Lengths & PicksBest Lens for Portrait Photography: 50, 85 or 135mm?Best Lens for Landscape Photography: Wide Zoom or Tele?Best Lens for Travel Photography: One Versatile LensBest Lens for Street Photography: 28, 35 or 50mm?Best Lens for Wildlife Photography: Reach on a BudgetBest Lens for Food Photography: Primes, Macro & FlatlaysBest Lens for Fashion Photography: Editorial to RunwayBest Lens for Architecture Photography: Tilt-Shift & WideBest Lens for Sports Photography: 70-200 to 400mmBest Lens (and Optics) for Drone Photography Explained

Before the shoot

Wedding Photography shot list