Filming a winter wedding when the sun sets at four

A December wedding is not a June wedding moved indoors. It is a wedding where almost everything after the vows is filmed in artificial light, and where the dark arrives before dinner does. That is not a problem to solve with camera settings. It is a problem to solve with the schedule, several weeks before anybody turns a camera on.

The light is the whole problem

In Boston the earliest sunset of the year falls in the first week of December, at about ten past four in the afternoon. In Washington it is about a quarter to five. Those are the extremes, and the weeks either side are not much better.

Two things surprise people. The first is that the earliest sunset comes roughly two weeks before the shortest day, so a wedding in early December is darker in the evening than one on the solstice. The second is how fast it moves in autumn: the clocks change, and a timeline that worked for a friend's October wedding loses an hour of usable light by the middle of November. Look up the sunset time for your actual date and your actual city, and write it on the schedule as a line of its own.

Move the timeline, not the camera settings

1. Put the sunset time on the day-of schedule, next to the hour it falls in. Every vendor then plans around a number instead of around a feeling about when it gets dark.
2. Everything you want daylight for happens before the ceremony. In summer this is a preference. In December it is the only daylight slot there is.
3. A first look stops being a tradition question. If you want photographs and footage of the two of you outside, in daylight, at a winter wedding, that is when it happens.
4. If you want couple portraits outdoors after the ceremony, the ceremony has to end at least forty-five minutes before sunset, and that means the ceremony starts earlier than it feels like it should.
5. Budget the coat time. Getting twelve people into coats, outside, photographed and back in takes a quarter of an hour that nobody puts on a schedule, and it is a quarter of an hour of the only daylight you have.
6. Ask the venue for one well-lit indoor spot you can use if it is raining, snowing or simply already dark. Have it chosen before the day rather than found during it.

Cold batteries go from full to empty with no warning

Cold slows the chemistry in a battery, so a pack rated for two hours gives you noticeably less, and it tends not to warn you on the way down. This is the single most common winter failure and it is entirely preventable.

• Keep spares in an inside pocket, against a body, not in a bag in the boot of a car.
• Swap before a battery is empty rather than after. Rotating two keeps the one in use from getting cold enough to matter.
• Do not warm a battery on a radiator and then put it into a cold camera. That is how you make condensation inside the thing you were trying to protect.
• Count on fewer hours than the rating, and carry one more than you think you need. If you are handing a camera to a guest for the night, hand them the spares too and show them the swap once.

The doorway is where cameras die

Carrying a cold camera into a warm room puts water on it, and then in it. Every winter wedding does this at least twice: outside for photographs, back in for the reception. A modern camera usually survives it. A tape camcorder often refuses to work at all, and that refusal is the camera protecting itself.

Sony's own guidance for a condensation warning on a camcorder is the shape of the problem: take the cassette out, switch the camera off, and leave it for at least an hour before trying again. The reason is that a damp tape sitting against a damp head can damage both. An hour is a long time at a wedding.

Snow lies to every camera

A snowy scene reads as bright, so the camera darkens the picture to compensate and you get grey snow and faces in shadow. Both the phone and the camcorder do this, and the fix is to tell the camera to overexpose: exposure compensation on a phone, or the exposure dial or the snow scene mode on a camcorder. Set it before you hand the camera to anybody, because they will not find it, and tape over the dial so it does not get nudged.

The same scene is also where a winter wedding looks better on camera than a summer one. Snow is a giant reflector. An overcast winter afternoon with snow on the ground is softer and more flattering light than midday in July, and it is the one time of year the weather is doing you a favour.

What winter is actually good for

The early sunset moves golden hour into the middle of the afternoon, so the prettiest light of the day falls during the part of the schedule you control, instead of arriving in the middle of dinner. Everything after that happens in warm indoor light, which on film reads as the inside of a party rather than as a dark room. Candles help, within limits, and when a reception is too dark to film covers where that limit is.

Winter is also the easiest season to book. If your date is in January or February rather than September, booking at short notice is a genuinely different conversation, and so is the price.

What we do differently in winter

We ask for the sunset time before we plan the day, and we plan backwards from it rather than forwards from the ceremony. The Hi8 camcorder comes off the outdoor portraits, because a camera of that era needs far more light than a modern one and a grey afternoon is not enough for it. Lights come to the reception as standard rather than as a maybe.

If you are filming your own winter wedding, the fill light stops being an optional extra and the batteries stop being someone else's problem. Everything in renting a camcorder for your wedding applies, with the battery count mattering roughly twice as much.