Free tool
What Your Day Of Coordination Fee Really Pays Per Hour
Enter the package fee and the hours a wedding honestly costs you, and see what is left per hour once your assistant and your vehicle are paid.
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Does the Photo List Fit Before Sunset?
Put in the sunset time, the ceremony end, and the shot list, and see whether the portraits finish in daylight or run into a schedule you will have to defend on the day.
Sunset is the one time on a wedding day that nobody can move. Everything else negotiates. That makes it the anchor for the portrait block, and it is where most timeline arguments quietly begin: a couple adds four family groupings in week eleven, nobody recounts the minutes, and the photographer ends up shooting the last three groups in the dark behind a barn.
This calculator does the recount for you. Enter the venue sunset for the date, the honest ceremony end, the number of named groupings on the shot list, and your travel to the photo location. It returns the daylight you have, the minutes the plan needs, and the buffer left, so you can hand a couple a number rather than an opinion.
Your result
Daylight minutes after the ceremony
150
From the recessional to sunset, before anything is scheduled into it.
Minutes the photo plan needs
118
Family groupings, portraits, and travel out to the location and back.
Buffer left before sunset
32
A negative result means the last frames happen after the light is gone.
Family groupings the light can hold
20
How many named groupings fit once portraits and travel are protected.
Keep at least fifteen minutes of buffer, because cocktail hour receiving lines and a missing grandfather both come out of this block.
Why the shot list is the number that moves
Sunset is fixed and travel is close to fixed. Portraits of the couple have a floor, because a photographer needs a certain number of setups regardless of how fast everyone walks. The only genuinely elastic number in this block is the family list, which is also the only number a couple keeps adding to after the timeline is approved.
That is why the fourth output matters more than the third. Telling a couple the plan is nine minutes over is an argument. Telling them the daylight holds twenty groupings and the list has twenty six is a decision they can make themselves, usually by moving the extended family combinations to the reception.
What to do when the buffer goes negative
There are four levers, in the order most coordinators should pull them. Move family groupings before the ceremony or into the reception. Add a first look, which moves wedding party and couple portraits out of this window entirely. Shorten travel by finding a photo location on the property. Last, and only with the officiant on board, start the ceremony earlier.
What you should not do is quietly shave a minute off each grouping and call it solved. A four minute grouping is four minutes because someone always has to be found, and a shot list built on three minute groupings is a cocktail hour that starts twenty minutes late with a photographer being blamed for it.
Questions about this calculator
Where do I find sunset for the venue?
Any sunset table for the venue city and the wedding date will do, and it is worth checking rather than guessing, because a date in early June and one in late August can differ by close to an hour. Note that usable light usually ends a little before the listed sunset in a wooded or walled site.
Should I use the printed ceremony start or the real one?
Use the time the recessional actually clears, which is usually the printed start plus the length of the ceremony plus the delay you know a given venue runs. Building on the printed number is how a fifteen minute optimism becomes a portrait block in the dark.
Does a first look change how I use this?
Yes, and it is the biggest single lever. With a first look, set the couple and wedding party minutes low or to zero for this window, because those frames happen earlier in the day. What remains after the ceremony is family groupings and whatever the photographer wants at golden hour.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The Wedding Day Run of Show Template
A fill in run of show built the way vendors read it, with a header block, call times by vendor, and the two checks that keep a room flip from opening late.
Take that number into your next wedding day timeline
A calculated portrait window or an honest coordination rate is worth something only when it reaches the document your florist, DJ, and venue manager work from, rather than a tab you close. Bring the result to a short demo and we will drop it into a real run of show, tag the blocks by vendor, and show you the page each of them opens on a phone. It takes about twenty minutes.