If you are a San Francisco City Hall Bride-to-Be, you want the perfect wedding. I have been involved in over 900 weddings at City Hall since 2012 and created this guide just for you. We also offer quite bit of advice about city hall weddings on our website and in other places on this blog. We have published the blog with the main intent of providing useful and up-to-date information regarding city hall wedding photography specifically, but also helpful marriage information. This particular post is ongoing and I update it every year because so many things change each year at San Francisco city hall. Especially with regard to rules and the wedding process.
Idea # 1 – Treat your San Francisco city hall wedding like you would any other wedding. City Hall is a formal and a magnificently beautiful wedding venue. The elegance of this building lends itself to making your event fancy and at the same time fun. I can’t tell you how many times my city hall brides have been surprised when they enter the building and see so many formal dresses on others. Many feel that since their San Francisco city hall wedding is a so called “Civil Ceremony” that people will be dressed more casually. They soon find that brides will often go all out with their dresses and the grooms will wear tuxes. It works here because of the high class atmosphere at San Francisco city hall. This atmosphere is created, in part, by the historical nature of the building. Also keep in mind, that you if you want to keep it casual, that is ok too! That is the beauty of a SF city hall wedding. As your city hall wedding photographer, we will adapt to whatever style suits you best. We know that everyone is different and some would rather not make a big deal out of things and keep it low key.
Don’t Forget the Flowers!
Some of our brides are disappointed when they realize they could have brought flowers. Many do not bring a bouquet and regret it later. They think of SF City Hall weddings as informal, so no flowers are purchased. From a city hall wedding photographer’s standpoint, I highly recommend flowers be included. Despite the obvious beauty of the building, there is one minor issue…. There is no color in the background at city hall, so adding some flowers provides some nice contrast and focus. Beautiful flowers really stand out in front of the gray and white backgrounds. The other great thing about having a floral bouquet is that it gives a bride something to do with her hands during the wedding photography posing (wedding gowns don’t have pockets!) In addition, many of our standard poses involve positioning the bouquet in some way or another. So it makes it easier for us as well. Great for the Groom to have a boutonniere also for the some of the same reasons. There are many local flower shops nearby, and you can check out this blog post of ours for more information about wedding flowers for city hall.
Idea #2 – Consider having a Reserved wedding at City Hall. For an extra $900 you can rent out either the Mayor’s Balcony or the 4th Floor North Gallery and have a semi-private ceremony at San Francisco City Hall. The cost of $1,000 is actually a bargain in San Francisco for a wedding celebration. They can seat up to 60 people and you get a roped off private area to have your wedding for 1 hour. Nobody will bother you and you will have the ultimate privacy available at a public building like San Francisco city hall. Both locations have their own advantages. Reserved weddings happen at city hall everyday! One thing to keep in mind is that you will need to provide your own officiant at cost of between $250 and $350. We can help with this too!
I like the Mayor’s Balcony for Reserved weddings because the view is great from the ceremony location. You are looking right at the Rotunda and Grand Staircase. What could be better? Well, the 4th floor also has some great things going for it. For one thing, since it is at the very top floor the sound is a little better. Not quite as much residual noise up there from the building. Also, a bit more privacy is available because less people come up the the 4th floor. Many do not even know about it! The strangers that do find their way up there really can’t watch anyway so they mostly get discouraged and go somewhere else. Sometimes at the Mayor’s Balcony we see wedding photographers or other brides and grooms trying to sneak into the space. Again, that never happens on the 4th floor North gallery since it is pretty far up in the building and easier to secure. If others do come up there it is pretty obvious and they are told to leave pretty quickly. Often by me!
Idea #3 – Book your city hall wedding Reception at a nearby Restaurant. There are a number of great places to eat that are walking distance from San Francisco city hall. Save money on transportation and have your wedding celebration at any one of them. It will be more convenient for your guests and will save you dollars! Some examples include: Doppio Zero and Absinthe, but there are many more! It is also quite fun to have a nice walk through the city as a newly married couple. The Hayes Valley neighborhood is pretty safe and you will be surprised at how much attention you will get as you walk through the area. If you don’t mind passersby by honking their car horns at you, things will be fine. Just do not head towards the Tenderloin which has become a lot more dangerous since the Pandemic. Fortunately, they are in completely different directions and are both easy to identify.
Idea #4 – Obtain your Marriage License the day before your city hall ceremony. Obviously it is much more convenient to process and receive your marriage license on the same day you have your civil ceremony and it normally works OK. However, as SF city hall wedding photographers, we have witnessed many times where this procedure backfires on the engaged couple. One of the reasons relates to timing. If you don’t allow enough of it between the license processing and the actual wedding ceremony, you might end up feeling rushed. I believe a couple’s wedding day should be a celebration without too much time spent processing paperwork. The other issue that occasionally comes up are documentation problems. If you do not have the appropriate documents to process the license and your wedding is in 30 minutes, you have a big problem. However, if you do this the day before, it gives you a full day to fix any issues and it is one less thing to worry about on your wedding day. We recently had a couple who had their divorces (to their previous spouses) processed incorrectly and it almost prevented them from being married. The point is, make sure you have these issues resolved well in advance.
There are also other options to obtain your marriage license in California that you can take care of way ahead of time if you wish. Lately I have noticed the the County Clerk can be behind on issuing marriage licenses on the day of the wedding, but the actual ceremonies are on time. This means that you might be late for your ceremony while waiting for your license. It is usually not a big problem, but it will delay things and make your guests have to wait around. One thing for sure is they will not start the wedding without you both especially since it was their fault that you’re running behind in the first place. So while it is nothing to worry about, it can still be a bit stressful.
Idea #5 – Hire a professional San Francisco city hall wedding photographer. OK, so you might have seen this coming since you happen to be reading a blog from a city hall wedding photographer. However, we would not be in this business if we didn’t strongly believe in what we do. I am not just talking about booking us for your wedding, I am encouraging SF city hall brides and grooms to hire any of the top city hall wedding photographers out there. There are many good ones and all of them want to provide you with great memories. Don’t try to save money by hiring “Uncle Bob” to do your wedding with his really cool new DSLR camera (that he barely knows how to use!). Even more importantly, don’t have your San Francisco City Hall wedding photographed with cell phones. We have been photographing weddings at this unique and historic venue for many years and we know all the great places to take you for amazing pictures. Plus lighting can be a challenge and cell phones are not equipped to deal with those issues.
Summary
We are here to help you in every aspect of your San Francisco city hall wedding day. We have been through it all and would love to share our expertise with you. We provide with more than just exceptional city hall wedding photography.
All five ideas are great. Your blog will definitely help those couples who are looking for a city hall marriage.
Thanks for your write-up on this weblog. From my personal experience, there are times when softening upwards a photograph could provide the wedding photographer with a bit of an imaginative flare. More often than not however, the soft blur isn’t just what you had as the primary goal and can often times spoil an otherwise good snapshot, especially if you intend on enlarging the item.