This super fun LGBTQ+ wedding was held on the 4th floor at beautiful San Francisco city hall. This marriage is what we call a "Reserved Wedding" which means that the couple paid extra to reserve this whole area for their marriage celebration and guests. We talk about the advantages of having a reserved ceremony in many places on this website. To summarize briefly, a reserved ceremony allows you to have a private area that is roped off for your San Francisco city hall marriage. You are able to keep this space for exactly one hour and the City Hall Events department will come and put signs up to keep all the strangers and tourists out. The cost is $1,000, but does not include an officiant or music. You will need to obtain those things on your own. You can estimate another $600+ for those 2 services, but it varies. The length of the ceremony can affect these costs as well. We can help with referrals on both of these wedding services if needed.
It all started with a "First Look". For those of you reading this who have not heard the term, it describes one of more the typical events we see these days that is part of the wedding day. A First Look is the first time the couple sees each other dressed in their wedding attire. It can be set up a number of different ways and we always discuss these details in advance with the couple to see what they prefer. I have listed below some of the suggestions we make to our San Francisco city hall couples for their First Look event.
There are many other variations on these ideas and some of our best First Looks were devised by our couples themselves. If you want our advice on how to do your First Look let us know. The ideas above usually work really well for wedding photography, but you may have something else in mind and we are happy to accommodate. We can position ourselves out of the way and capture the moments as they occur. Once the couple has seen each other and the hugging and tears stop, we leave the area to give the couple a chance to have some private time. San Francisco city hall is a fantastic place to do all of this because there are many areas that allow privacy, but still possess beautiful backgrounds. We know them all and will be happy to review these various locations with you in advance.
As you can see in the first sequence of photos in the gallery, this First Look had everything you would want in a SF City Hall wedding reveal. An amazingly unique wedding dress, tears and laughter. One of the LGBTQ brides could barely hold back her tears as she waited to see her future bride reveal herself. Once they both saw each other, it was great moment and lots of laughing and happiness. This really epitomized what a "Reveal" should look like.
As their San Francisco city hall wedding photographers, we did a nice job of capturing the moments from start to finish. After the wedding photography of this sequence was over, we gave them a moment to talk and hug by leaving them alone for bit. Then we escorted both of them to the 4th floor to get ready for their SF City Hall reserved wedding ceremony. They were greeted with lots of happiness and cheers with everyone very ready for the wedding to commence. The early parts of this wedding celebration could not have gone better.
Of course all that was left at this point was to proceed with their ceremony and they were lucky enough to have chosen Cynthia Gregory as their city hall officiant. Cynthia just happens to be one of our favorite wedding officiants and she has performed hundreds and even thousands of weddings at this historic building. She also is part of the regular San Francisco city hall civil ceremony rotation so she even wears the official robes.
She did a wonderful job as usual on this medium length and emotional LGBTQ+ wedding ceremony. One of the brides was escorted by her father with the other bride watching with tears in her eyes. After the ring exchange and the kiss, the ceremony was completed. We then handled all of their family and friend pictures including one large group photo which included everyone at the wedding! The final part of their wedding experience at city hall was our city hall photo tour and you can see some of those photos above. We took them all through the building for some great wedding pictures and memories.