A spring wedding: everything blooms, the photographs too
Blossom, greenery and longer days make spring special for photographs. What a spring wedding gives an album and what should be planned in advance.
Lazar Mihajlović
Published: 11 September 2026
There is a week in April when the orchards come into blossom and every frame looks as if someone had paid a set designer. Couples who marry at that time get a background that cannot be ordered, and one that lasts so briefly that half of its charm lies exactly in that.
Spring weddings have a rhythm of their own. Nature wakes up, the days grow longer, and the energy of the guests is different from any other part of the year. Here is what that means for the photographs and what is worth planning in advance.
I am writing this at the end of October on purpose. Couples planning spring now have the loveliest part of the preparations ahead of them, the part where everything can still be chosen calmly.
Blossom and greenery: scenery for free
What a decorator does inside the venue, spring hands out for free outdoors. A blossoming orchard, a tree lined avenue or an ordinary meadow in flower carry a frame on their own. It is enough to find one such place and the portraits gain a depth and a colour no studio can offer.
A small piece of advice: the blossom is at its peak for about ten days, and the exact date depends on the year. If it matters to you, we choose the portrait location flexibly, a week before the wedding, when it is already clear what has come into bloom.
May brings what April promises: greenery that is still fresh and saturated, before the summer heat tires it out. At that stage of the year there is almost no bad location, because even an ordinary country road framed by hedges looks like a tended park. On top of that, flowers for the decoration are in season, so the bouquet and the venue naturally follow what you see through the window.
Softer light and longer days
The spring sun does not have the summer harshness yet, so even the middle of the day is kinder to photographs. The days grow longer week by week, the timeline breathes, and the sunset in May comes late enough that portraits can be made even after dinner has started, when everyone is already relaxed.
Just count on spring evenings being noticeably cooler than the afternoon. For portraits near the end of the day, the bride should have something warm at hand, a shawl or a jacket that comes off for the frame and goes back on right after.
For the timeline, a longer day means freedom in practice: the ceremony and the congratulations pass without a race against the dark, and we can move the portraits by half an hour if the light opens up right then. In winter the same decision would cost you frames, in May it costs nothing.
Changeable weather calls for a plan B
April and May can change three seasons in a single day. Rain in spring arrives quickly and passes quickly, so it is rarely a real problem, but a plan B has to exist before it is needed: a covered terrace, a porch or an indoor location with good window light.
What that backup plan looks like in practice I described in the piece on rain at a wedding. The short version: rain clouds soften the light and some of the loveliest portraits are made exactly then.
So we plan a spring wedding with two versions of the portraits in mind, the sunny one and the other one. When both exist, rain stops being a source of panic and becomes ordinary information. At a good share of the weddings I photograph, plan B never comes up at all.
May gets booked first
In every photographer's calendar May is the month that fills up first, right alongside September. If you are reading this in autumn and planning a spring wedding next year, now is the right moment for bookings: the venue first, the photographer immediately after, then everything else.
I wrote in more detail about timing in the piece on when to book a photographer. For spring dates a simple rule applies: whoever asks first, chooses.
The same rule holds for the other vendors couples want in May. Venues, bands and makeup artists with the best recommendations fill their calendars months ahead, so one enquiry sent early often decides how the whole day will look.
Lazar Mihajlović Photography
Planning a spring wedding?
Spring dates go first. Send the date and location, we will check availability and start planning the frames under the blossom.
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