Guest Blog- How to Be Green with your Wedding Photos

How to Be Green with your Wedding Photos

The Green Hanger Shop was started after my husband and I hosted two beautiful weddings for our daughters. Through our experience, we realized that there were many opportunities for making weddings more eco-friendly, such as reusing all those gorgeous gowns and party dresses. Since our start-up in January, we have discovered other companies with the same mission. Featured in this blog is The Wedding Lens, an online digital photography website dedicated to weddings. I regret I did not know about them last year when my youngest daughter was married. I can not tell you how many friends and family were eagerly taking pictures. What I can tell you is how many pictures I actually saw that were taken by them. Exactly three! I begged for more, but to no avail. One uncle even flashed us as we walked down the church aisle. (Hear my Southern gasp!) Now I would love to see it from that angle, but it is trapped in his camera. If only we had arranged a website for everyone to upload their pictures beforehand. What a great concept! I know there are other photo websites and social networks, but here is the ONE website where everyone can meet, view, comment, and even print their favorite shots. It's a great website with too many features to include here, but some of my favorites are that it's free for standard membership, password protected, and has unlimited uploads. Couples also receive unlimited guests and invitations for a full year. While neither The Wedding Lens nor I would recommend this in place of a professional photographer, it is something I would definitely recommend that brides include in their plans. I thank Natasha Carroll-Ferrary for taking the time to share these tips on how to make your wedding photos more earth friendly.

'Many couples want to put disposable cameras on each table so that they can see the wedding from their guests’ perspective. It’s a great idea – but it’s not very green. It requires buying disposable cameras, printing hundreds of potentially blurry photos (that may get thrown out), and disposing of the cameras (most of which aren’t biodegradable).
So what can you do? Encourage your guests to bring their digital cameras – which should be easy to do because they were probably going to bring them anyway! Then, after the wedding, you can have your guests upload all their photos to an online wedding photo album site, like The Wedding Lens.
On a site like The Wedding Lens, guests are able to upload all their photos and videos. From there, everyone can download the photos and videos that they like the best, and they can order prints of their favorite photos. There’s no need to order prints of any of the blurry photos – so the couple saves money and the environment saves photo paper.
The best part is that at the end, the couple has a collection of all the photos of their wedding from their guests’ point of view – just like the disposable cameras, but without the waste.

The Wedding Lens is an online photo sharing website, designed for couples who want to collect all the photos from their wedding. The site was started by two college friends, Justin & John. Justin was getting married and looking for an online photo site, but couldn’t find anything that met all his needs. He and John got together and developed The Wedding Lens. They pride themselves on their 100% satisfaction guarantee and phenomenal customer service. For more tips, check out our wedding planning blog and our 50 Green Wedding Tips.'