Rain on your wedding day is not a disaster

The question always arrives the same way. Late at night, about ten days out, after someone has refreshed the forecast one too many times. What happens if it rains?

Here is the honest answer. It might. You are getting married in a temperate rainforest with a skyline attached. And it will not wreck your day, your dress, or your photos.

The couples who have a genuinely hard time in the rain are almost never the ones who got the worst weather. They are the ones who spent eleven months planning for sun and forty minutes planning for anything else.

Vancouver rain is mostly not what you are picturing

When people imagine a rainy wedding they picture a downpour. Sheets of water, a flooded lawn, guests sprinting for the doors. That version exists. It is rare, and it usually does not last.

What we get far more often is soft and grey and intermittent. A twenty minute shower, then a lull, then a bright hour where the cloud thins and everything is still wet and glowing. Shoulder season weddings here get that pattern constantly, and a photographer who knows the city is watching for those lulls all afternoon. We are not standing there hoping. We are moving your portraits to 4:40 because the sky is about to open up for fifteen minutes.

Overcast is the light we would have picked anyway

This is the part that surprises people, so I will say it plainly. A flat grey sky is the best lighting a wedding photographer can be handed.

Full midday sun is the actual problem. It puts hard shadows across faces, makes everyone squint, blows out a white dress and leaves raccoon eyes under the brow. We work around it constantly. Cloud cover does the opposite. It turns the whole sky into one enormous softbox. Skin goes even, colour holds, nobody is squinting, and we can put you anywhere instead of hunting for shade.

Rain adds things on top of that. Wet pavement reflects light and neon. Cedar and moss go a deep saturated green that dry days never give you. A window with rain on it becomes a frame. Puddles become mirrors. A clear umbrella held overhead bounces soft light down onto two faces, which is the entire reason we carry them.

What actually goes wrong, and it is not the weather

In our experience the rain itself causes almost no damage. Three other things do.

No backup, or a backup nobody has seen. An outdoor ceremony with a vague plan to move inside is not a plan. It is a decision you are leaving to your most stressed self on the worst possible morning.

Travel time. Rain slows everything in this city. The drive from a North Shore getting ready suite to a downtown venue can double. If your timeline has no slack, weather does not break the photos, it breaks the schedule, and a rushed schedule is what actually costs you coverage.

Deciding too late. The worst version of a rainy wedding is the one where the call gets made at 2:50 for a 3:00 ceremony, while ninety guests stand in a field and a coordinator tries to move two hundred chairs.

The rain plan worth making in month two

Make this at booking, not in the final week. It takes about an hour.

• Choose the indoor option and go stand in it. Walk the room. Look at the light. If it is ugly, you want to know that in March, not on the day.
• Set a decision time and a decision maker. Ours is usually ninety minutes before the ceremony, and the call belongs to your planner or coordinator, not to you. Write it down. Tell the vendors.
• Build twenty minutes of slack into the timeline. That buffer is the single most useful thing on a wet day, and it is quietly useful on a dry one too.
• Find your covered portrait spot. A colonnade, a lobby, a parkade edge, a canopy of big trees. We will scout one near your venue and put it in the timeline so nobody has to invent a plan in the rain.
• Tell us you are game. If you are willing to step outside for five minutes in real rain, say so early. That is the frame you will end up printing.

Worth buying, and not worth buying

Worth it. Four to six matching clear umbrellas. Clear, not patterned, and bought as a set so the photos do not look like a lost and found. A second pair of shoes you can actually walk in. A stack of cheap towels in the car. One trusted person assigned to the dress hem, which is a real job and should go to someone who volunteered.

Not worth it. A last minute tent you will probably not use and will definitely pay for. A whole second outfit. Any emotional energy at all spent on a ten day forecast, which in this city is roughly a rumour.

The couples who ended up glad

Here is the contrarian part. Some of our favourite galleries came out of weddings that rained all day.

Havana and Eric married at Hart House on Deer Lake in steady October rain with twenty guests, and the weather is the reason that day looks the way it does. Everyone went inside. Everyone got closer. The heritage house did what it was built to do, the garden went luminous and empty, and the two of them walked out under one white umbrella into the best ten minutes of the afternoon.

Weather you did not choose gives a day a spine. It makes people laugh, improvise, huddle, and stop performing. That is the exact emotional register we are trying to photograph anyway, and sun rarely hands it to us for free.

You cannot control the forecast. You can control the backup, the buffer, and who you hired. Do those three and rain becomes a texture in your wedding photos instead of a problem in your wedding day.

Planning a wet season Vancouver wedding?

SimplyWed Studio photographs weddings and elopements across Vancouver, rain included. If you are looking at an October or a February date and want a straight answer about what that week actually looks like, send us the date. We will tell you.

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