Being a wedding photographer means you interact with many people, including the bride, groom, and their families, and travel to new destinations. However, a wedding photographer’s job is not as fun as it seems. There are numerous moments when these folks think about changing their professions.

Wedding photographers witness real bridezilla and groomzilla moments and many other surprising instances behind the scenes of taking the perfect shot.

Some wedding photographers opened up on Reddit about the worst moments caught on camera. Most of them had no idea they would witness something like that.

Comments have been edited for clarity and grammar.

1. It Started Raining

u/TouchToLose: The wedding was on a pier. The couple and the planner kept checking the radar on their phones for the rain to decide whether to do the wedding on the pier or take it inside.

I looked at the pier and said to them, “I don’t know what your radar says, but those are rain clouds.” They make the call to do the ceremony on the pier anyway.

About three minutes into the ceremony, it starts to rain. Out of nowhere, a man appears with a heart-shaped wicker box.

I always ask the couple if there is anything different about the wedding I should know. They never said anything to me about this, so I was caught off guard. Cool. Fine. I just keep shooting.

He hands the box to the bride. She opens it up, and there are two doves in there. Ok. Pretty cool. I’ve heard of a dove release but have never actually seen one. But these doves were NOT feeling it. They just sat there and were like, yeah, no, it’s the beach, and it’s raining.

The bride looks at the bird handler. Back at the birds. Shakes the box. Nothing. He motions for her to scoot them out of the box. She reaches in there, and they immediately flee the box.

They both fly directly into her face. I shot in burst mode and got a pretty wild sequence of shots. One of the birds gets caught in her weave, and she shakes her head while swatting at the bird to free it.

Then, the bottom falls out. It was pouring rain and heavy winds. The officiant continues like nothing is happening—zero sense of urgency.

People are just getting up and heading inside. One of the family members gets up in the middle of the aisle and starts screaming and chanting, “JUST SAY I DO! KISS!”

They do, and it starts raining even harder. I backpedaled down the pier as they ran through the rain. The shots of them running through the rain are beautiful.

The whole wedding was a complete mess. The couple told me that I was the only thing that went right on their wedding day, that looking at my pictures made them happy, and that the pictures made the awful day look beautiful.

2. The Sad Couple
u/BioregenerativeLamp: I got there way too early since I had to do some pictures of the place and some of them pre-ceremony. I met the future husband and talked to him and his bride about what I would do.

The ceremony starts, and everything is going well enough. I had to be ready all the time in case the couple called me or something happened, so I was constantly close and scouting for them.

Sometimes, I would see some good moments or have some idea, and I would ask them if they wanted a picture, so I’d take it.

At some point, the couple is no longer inside, so I go around to look for them. I spotted them outside in the back of the place, which was a beautiful patio with decorations and all that thing.

They are just close, talking side by side with heads slightly tilted towards each other, and I think, “Aww yeah, this is going to be a great pic,” and I try to come closer without them looking.

I take the picture after zooming in, and only then do they simultaneously notice me, and I notice that they have the saddest faces I’ve seen in a bride and groom.

I ask if everything is okay, and they say yes, so I let it go. “Not my place,” I said, but when the party was almost over, the groom approached me, and in the middle of the conversation, he said that the ceremony was so exhausting for them because they knew almost nobody there.

It turns out the mother of the groom “had” to have a wedding for his son and orchestrated the whole thing without them knowing, invited her friends and family, and then told them that they would have to come from where they lived (which was far away) to their wedding.

That was on top of the fact that the son wasn’t on good terms with his mother, and the bride hated her. Apparently, the mother was very abusive and manipulative.

The only person the groom knew was his brother, who got very drunk as soon as the ceremony allowed him to, and the bride knew nobody.

Later, looking at the photos, I noticed that when the two were together alone, they looked lovely and happy, but their warmth would slightly die when the mother was present in the picture, but that might be my confirmation bias. I don’t know.

I remember that the groom said, “I probably know you more than I know most people at this party,” and had me sit down, eat cake and drink with him and the bride, and wait out the rest of the people.

I didn’t send them that picture of them, although I always wondered if I should have. They were very intimate and enduring something together, and it was a perfect picture outside the emotion.

3. The Baby
u/EmptyCupMedia: I filmed a guy pushing a baby carriage. The two sides of the family were not fans of one another, and I filmed a nice moment where a gentleman was talking to a baby in a push carriage.

The baby reached for his beer bottle, and the guy let the baby touch it. Well, the father of the kid grabbed the beer bottle and chucked it down the field, then shouted at the guy, “You don’t give beer to kids!”

So, the beer guy made a mean face and shoved the carriage slightly. I got it all on tape from about 20 feet away. I even got a cutaway of the smashed beer bottle the guy threw.

u/Motogirlmx: After ten years of wedding photography, I witnessed the moment before the ceremony where the groom sneezed a bloody nose onto the front of the bride’s beaded dress.

Apparently, he gets bloody noses when he gets nervous. They stopped all photos and got emergency Sprite soda cleaning done in the hotel/ceremony location.

I was asked to delete all photos and keep the situation from the bride’s mother. The bride was surprisingly understanding!

Two hours of pre-ceremony photos were cut short, but the stain was removed quickly enough to not be noticeable for the ceremony.

After review, I had a perfect mid-sneeze shot with red drops flying out of the groom’s face. It’s sad to see that one edited.

5. The Inappropriate Photos
u/plopploptoot: There was this aunt of the bride or groom (not sure which) who wore a dress that I’m pretty sure was meant to be a long blouse.

She was dancing in the middle of a circle of people at the reception, so I peered in between two people and snapped photos of her.

I didn’t realize until I had gotten home and pulled them up on my computer that her “dress” was bouncing up when she jumped and exposed her privates.

This was a wedding that I shot for an event company, so the way that works is that I just turn over the raw files to the company, and an editor edits them and delivers the album to the client.

I forgot to warn them about the inappropriate photos, but you’d think they would notice. Nope. I wound up seeing the couple’s final album in the system after it had already been emailed to them, and lo and behold, the photos are in there.

6. The Groom’s Punch
u/[deleted]: My friend is a photographer. He does weddings. He got punched in the face by the groom because the groom decided that the photographer was “taking too many photos of the bride.” Weddings seem to bring out the worst in humanity.

7. I Couldn’t Suppress My Laughter
u/OfficialAnorak: I’m not a “real wedding photographer,” but I mainly do portraits and figure photography. I was invited to a wedding once as a backup, and it was a very sunny day. Therefore, the bride felt hot in her long dress. She started fiddling because she wanted to escape the direct sun (but the lighting was perfect).

She then slipped, knocked her shoulder right onto the concrete, and her shoulder got dislocated. One of the bridesmaids just saw the dislocated shoulder of the bride and passed out right onto the husband.

It’s tough to suppress your laughter when you see a bride holding her shoulder and the groom having a quite corpulent lady lying on his back.

8. Help Me!