Expert Survival Tip: Giving Back to The Bride and Groom
Pretty much every wedding guest carries a camera with them to capture their guest experience of the wedding day. So in addition to the flashbulbs of the professional photographer, the newlyweds will certainly be seeing lots of stars all the way until the time they leave for their honeymoon. When all is said and done, for the bride and groom the whole event might suddenly seem like a blur.
Rush Hambleton, the creator of Canditto - a super-cool and super easy-to-use kiosk device that can make copies of all digital pictures taken at any event (i.e., copy all wedding guest photos while guests are still at the wedding), shares with Survive Wedding Season his thoughts on giving back to the bride and the groom with photos. Canditto itself was developed out of Rush’s own wedding day experience - he and his wife wished they could have had access to all the wedding photos taken by their friends and family in addition to what the professional captured. Now Rush has developed just the right thing to help other couples enjoy all the memories. Thank you Rush:
Ask any married couple and they will tell you that their 8-hour wedding was over in a flash. Most couples don’t even find time to eat a much-deserved (and needed) meal. The combination of people, commotion and the density of a great wedding leave most brides and grooms feeling like they experienced the whole night looking through a pinhole camera, which undoubtedly leaves for so much more that they never were able to see!
Providing these missing perspectives is how a good guest can become an excellent guest. They can do this by quite simply sharing the digital photos they took on the couple’s special day. Sharing your photos from the wedding is truly meaningful for the bride and groom because even the most routine photos show them something they would never otherwise see but will treasure forever: their wedding from your perspective. Since most guests naturally bring cameras and snap these photos anyway, the only hard part is actually delivering photos to the hosts in a timely and archive-able way. Let’s take a look at each of these two criteria:
Timeliness:
In an ideal world the picture-perfect guest would deliver a nice stack of photos just as the bride and groom head to their honeymoon so that the newlyweds can enjoy these photos before their wedding-buzz has worn off. Realistically there aren’t a lot of great ways to do this - short of taking your camera’s memory card to a pharmacy the morning after and blasting out a dozen or two 4″ x 6″ prints. The combination of “sobriety”, a pharmacy with a working printer, and sufficient time seldom make this ideal possible.
But if the photos cant be ready in time for the honeymoon, then the next best thing is to have them ready when the couple returns home. This leaves only a week or so lead time, which usually means that the Internet will be involved. Using the Internet typically jeopardizes criteria #2 - archive-ability - which is described next.
Archive-ability:
Remember, what you consider to be a simple candid snapshot may be a forever keepsake for your just-married friends. Imagine how you would want your most cherished photos saved and you will probably realize that the scattered, low-resolution, ‘cloud storage’ offered by most online photo hosting sites is not a good choice. Yes, they make sharing easy, but it usually saddles your friends with the obligation to pay to get high-resolution prints.
Additionally, it is difficult to imagine your friends logging onto your preferred photo album website on their 50th anniversary to see the handful of pics you took at their wedding, half a century earlier. Same goes for Facebook. Alternatively, emailing high resolution jpeg files does allow the recipient to store them however he or she sees fit, but most people find this technique overwhelms inboxes and challenges even the most patient people as they wait to upload and then download the dozens of photos received.
The hands-down winners in the archive-ability contest are: 1- the photo-filled flashdrive or 2- the CD-ROM - both delivered by snail mail. Indeed it is labor-intensive but succeeding at this earns nearly as many brownie points as helping a friend move his or her furniture into a 3rd story walk up. Pull it off, and you will be something of a hero.
Commercial Solution:
There is a commercial solution that combines the best of these two pillars - Canditto. It is a machine that collects all the guests’ photos while they are still at the reception and delivers two flash drives the moment the celebration is over - one is for the bride and groom to keep, the other is a backup that can be given to the new in-laws. It is cleverly designed to copy only the photos taken in the last few hours - which protects guest privacy - and it can be used at the rehearsal dinner, wedding reception and even the Sunday brunch, all for about the same cost as an hour or two of a professional photographer’s time.
Canditto can collects upwards of 500 photos at a typical 100 person wedding. Best of all, it can be given as a wedding gift by a guest, or couple of guests depending on budgets. To read more about this service visit www.Canditto.com.
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Have you used Canditto? Tell us what you think in our comments section below.
Related topics:
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Create A Wedding Day Bridal Emergency Kit by Tiffany Bordelon-Walsh & Lindsay Bellock
Professional - AND Affordable - Wedding Style & Makeup Tips by Karen Gorham
Personalized Wedding Poems by Chloe Yelena Miller
Get Gifting - The New Wedding Card Box by Marni Gold and Linda Protovin
Make A Funny Face! A Unique Wedding Gift Solution
Have a great wedding survival tip to share with the Survive Wedding Season community? Email your tips to solutions@surviveweddingseason.com.
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About the Author
Rush Hambleton is the founder of Canditto, Inc. Inspired by a photo taken by a guest at his own wedding, Hambleton’s business rents proprietary devices that help hosts collect all their guest’s photos. His company has been featured in New York Times, the Boston Globe, and won first place at Babson’s Forum for Innovation in 2008.
Tags: alternative wedding gifts, Canditto, Rush Hambleton, Wedding Blog, Wedding Group Gifts
