Venues and the checking out of

That's a picture of a venue, in this case Buxted Park in East Sussex which is just down the road from us. But for the purposes of what follows, it could be pretty much any venue anywhere.

When we first started shooting weddings, one of the first things we did after getting the booking was check out the venue. We did this for three reasons: it was apparently expected of us, other photographers seemed to make a big deal of doing it, and frankly we didn't know any better.

After a while, three things became apparent. One was that because we rarely work at local venues, checking one out could easily wipe out half or more of a working day. Another was that as we got more experience, we found that from an operational and logistics point of view, a lot of places are actually pretty similar. And the third was that we'd often find that having checked the place out, things were very different indeed on the day!

So for the last few years we've worked on the principle that if we don't know a venue, we'll check it out if we're in the area on other business and we can make the time to do so. Otherwise, we won't unless it's obvious to us that we need to.

One final thought on this is that at some venues, the people you're dealing with will assure you that it's absolutely vital that your photographer checks it out because otherwise they won't have a clue where to go or what to do and your pictures will be a disaster.

No they won't.