A man dances in front of a seated woman at a lively reception, adding to the night’s collection of strange wedding day stories.

I’ve photographed weddings for a long time and that comes equipped with so many strange wedding day stories. It just comes to a point where cake, chaos, and questionable decisions may just be the only way to describe a wedding day. However, for the sake of ambiguity, no names. Not in any particular order, but here’s some oddball things that have happened on a wedding day.

1: The Hotel Fire

This was of no fault to the wedding guests or party, but we were shooting an incredibly long wedding day and had finally found ourselves getting ready to photograph the ceremony. Every thing was going great, the food served pre-ceremony was perfect, the guests were friendly and happy, the venue was beautifully decorated, and the bride was absolutely stunning. This particular wedding came with some language barrier challenges that we learned pretty quickly how to deal with and handle, as this wasn’t our first non-english-speaking wedding to photograph.

The wedding begins, and everything was off without a hitch, I’m looking for my visual cues that were discussed ahead of time. Completely locked in to my environment, I hear a loud noise coming from the FRONT of the room, right in the line of sight.

The room above us had a small fire, and caused no need to evacuate. You may be asking yourself how I knew that we came to decision so brazenly apathetic. How did we know that there was no need to evacuate? I’m so glad you asked actually. We knew to stay put because there was an audio track on a loop telling us that there was no need to evacuate, playing on repeat for pretty much the remainder of this not-so-short ceremony.

Alas, the show must go on.

2: The “I’ve said some stuff” Groomsman

This one is far less chaotic but just required some damage control in the editing room. I was photographing a wedding that, unbeknownst to me, there was already some strange tension in the air that we WON’T talk about as it’s pretty specific.

The bride wanted some interviews of her bridesmaids before the ceremony, as well as the groomsmen. Keep in mind that at this particular time we offered wedding videography as well. Since I was handling the photography side and there was nothing to photography in that moment, I moved over to start getting some detail shots and wedding party formals as they wrapped up their interviews.

This all was great. Smooth process and it went as planned. However, my videographer did mention one funny detail that I still laugh every time I think about. He told me that he gave the best man our lapel mic before they started shooting and just let it roll while he finished getting setup, so that he’d know it was ready when he was. So they wrap the interview, the best man takes off the mic and looks at my videographer and says “so, uhh… do you guys listen to all of that?”. To which Chris responds “nah man, Zakk has a program that he syncs the camera audio up with the lapel audio so that he doesn’t have to manually go through and listen to every clip. I can assure you, nobody has time to listen to everything you said before shooting”. The best man with a look of relief responds “good, because I said some stuff. It’s not my fault the grooms mom is so hot”.

3: The Smiling Granny

Early in my career I learned that cajuns take wedding day very seriously, and by that I mean the drinking and dancing portion. I was shooting one of my first weddings to ever shoot on my own, so today was a big day for me. It was also within the target demographic I was looking for. At this point I had second shot a ton of weddings and was super familiar with how these crazy cajuns acted during the reception. I wasn’t exactly ready when they put a chair in the middle of the dance floor, sat the bride down and proceeded to have every guy in the room give her a lap dance. I was laughing until my gut was hurting.

Then the bride got up, slighting embarrassed, but a great sport. It was grandmas turn. The proceeding to do the lap dance thing again. This time, guys had their shirts unbuttoned and really putting on a show. One guy even ripped the crotch of his pants trying to show off his “moves”

Keep in mind that this was early in my career and early in my marriage, so I had very limited space in our one bedroom apartment. So I’m sitting on the couch, editing these photos and start showing them to my wife as I relive the night, laughing my butt off. Then I get to the photo of the guy with the ripped pants and my wife’s eyes got big and she started laughing and said “that’s my cousins husband”. Sure enough, I could vaguely see her cousin the background wearing a face of sheer embarrassment.

We hadn’t been married long, so I kind of knew her cousins but had never met their spouses. Needless to say, her Aunt found these photos absolutely hilarious.

A man with ripped jeans dances humorously for the bride, adding to the strange wedding day stories at a lively reception.

4: The Button Said No

Sometimes buttons disagree. This particular button belonged to a wedding dress that was absolutely stunning. Despite how I started this story, no, the dress wasn’t too tight or the wrong fit. It actually fit perfect. The problem was that the button wasn’t exactly fastened on well and opted out of receiving future emails.

The button flew off like something out of a movie, nearly taking a few eyeballs out on its journey to Valhalla.

Luckily someone arrived in time to fix the dress on-site before the ceremony. However, all of our pre-ceremony photos had to be done without the button gracing it with it’s presence. If I remember correctly, I think we safety pinned it so that we could move on. Sometimes strange wedding day stories lead to you discovering new in-laws.

5: The “I Don’t Feel So Well”

Again, at this particular time, we offered videography services. We don’t offer that anymore, but man, did we get stories from that time period. This one is by far one of the most strange wedding day stories.

The wedding is going great so far, everyone has made it down the aisle and the bride is looking into the eyes of her groom, just waiting for the minister to walk them into their future together. He begins to give a beautiful sermon about love and marriage when suddenly theres a huge PLOP sound. One of the groomsmen fainted. Face in the floor and out of order. So, while experiencing some brief panic, they grab a chair and sit him down and give him some water. Now this comes as there was a man on the front row, who’s clearly a medical professional of some sorts, says “don’t sit him down or give him water right now”. I don’t know if that was solid advice, or even medically sound, but I’m dumb and would have probably just taken the advice.

The wedding proceeds to begin again. About 6.7 seconds into the minister trying to regain the rooms attention by talking about a beautiful life together and how marriage is a gift from God, the groomsman pukes everywhere, and hits the ground again.

It was at this point they escorted him back to the prep room and made him lay down for the remainder of the ceremony.

The funniest part about all of this is that the groomsman in question was perfectly fine during the reception, dancing and having a grand time.

As I left, I went to say goodbye to the bride and groom. I said “hey, don’t sweat what happened earlier, I’ll do my best to edit that out. The good news is that it fell at a spot that I think I can make a solid cut at”. The bride responded with “please do what you can, I DO NOT want to remember that”. The groom responded with “Actually, if the mic I’m wearing picked up the spot when he pukes, I want that. Even better if you actually caught that part on camera”.