{Real Grooms: Finishing Touches}

In our continuing series, Real Grooms, guest blogger, Danny Lai explores the photography and videography aspects of planning a wedding. Once again, I give you the wise opinions of a wedding obsessed groom!

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Photographs and videos are the most common ways to document a wedding. But, it's also nice to have guests leave a little message for the wedding couple. At most weddings, guests sign a guest book or a large photograph. Guests can sign their names and leave nice messages for the bride and groom. But because the guest book is available for signing just before the reception, guests don't have time to think of witty, thoughtful messages, and end up writing something generic like, "Congrats!". A guest book memento would be more meaningful if your guests' messages better captured their personality, or their emotions
during your wedding.

Here are some ways to get your guests' creative juices flowing:

1. A guest book filled with blank paper is imposing for any guest.
Instead, provide some seeded funny questions for your guests to
answer, such as "What fictional duo do [bride and groom] remind you
of?" or "If [bride] is throwing out all of [groom]'s stuff and [groom]
could keep only one thing, what would it be?". These questions can be
printed on little note cards, and guests can write in their answer,
sign their name, and tape it in the guest book.

2. Keep the guest book displayed in a prominent place even after the
reception has started, so that people notice it. Before the
reception, guests are hungry and just want to find their seat, sit
down, and have a drink and some bread. They don't want to waste time
signing stuff. After the dinner portion of the reception, guests have
more time to walk around, mingle with friends, take a break from
dancing, and are more likely to take a minute to write something
clever. Some guests may have had more to drink by this time, making
their comments even more interesting.

3. Thank your guests for their participation by giving them their own
memento as well. A photo booth is a great way to capture how your
guests looked and felt at your wedding. They can keep one photostrip
as a memento, and paste another one in the guestbook. With photo
strips, you won't even need guests to write thoughtful witty comments.
The entertaining pictures themselves are worth more than a thousand
words.

The day after our wedding, the first thing we did was to flip through
the photo scrapbook that our guests made during the reception. I
imagine that many years later, this scrapbook will still be the one
memento we use to recount the people who attended our wedding.

Photograph from Martha Stewart.com