I thought it would be appropriate to post this wedding from a past holiday season to help get us all in the mood for Christmas wedding photography at San Francisco city hall. The reason I mention this now in late October is because it’s now time to book your Christmas wedding at San Francisco City Hall . With the holiday season just a couple months away you need to start thinking about booking a ceremony time and also experienced City Hall wedding photographer. All of the good times and dates will be gone soon as will the better and more experienced wedding photographers. So hopefully the following blog post of a beautiful Christmas wedding will inspire you to get those reservations in place.
I particularly loved this wedding because the couple went all out to create an elegant marriage during the holiday season. Both the bride and the groom wore formal clothes. The bride with an amazing long and beautiful wedding dress and the groom with his tux and tails. We have said this before, but San Francisco city hall takes a back seat to nobody when it comes to elegance. It is probably the only location on the west coast where a couple could wear this type of formal wear and fit totally in for a simple $100 civil ceremony. Only at San Francisco city hall can this kind of thing happen!
Wedding Ceremony on the Mayor’s Balcony
This elegant couple took advantage of the fact that you can choose your ceremony location during the Holiday season because of the giant Christmas tree being in the way. The Christmas tree is always put up in the Rotunda area, which is where the standard civil ceremonies always take place. So the County Clerk often gives the couple the option of moving their ceremony to other locations throughout San Francisco city hall.
UPDATE: New for 2024 (and I assume this will continue in 2025) is an alternative location on the 3rd floor for civil ceremonies, but I have already seen (this year) marriage commissioners allowing couples to choose a better location within the building if available. There is still that flexibility during the Christmas season that we do not usually see for ceremony locations.
As mentioned, this couple was given the choice and were lucky enough to find the Mayor’s Balcony completely empty and our very nice Deputy Marriage Commissioner granted their wish and moved their civil ceremony to that location. As you can see in the photo below, it was a very private area and they had it all to themselves. Normally, if you want to have your wedding on the Mayor’s Balcony, you have to pay $1,000 for a reserved wedding. Of course these newlyweds did not need the chairs or the area to be roped off like they do for the reserved weddings on the Mayor’s Balcony since they had no guests. Their wedding photographer (me) was the only witness. By the way, I was also their official witness with my signing of the marriage license.
SF City Hall Wedding Photography Tour Pictures
Of course, as we always do, we took our elegant Christmas couple around the building for photos at various locations. We guided them to some of our favorite locations on all 4 floors of the building and also listened to some of their suggestions for wedding pictures they were really hoping for. We spent a good 1 hour walking around SF City Hall and having the newlyweds pose for some amazing pictures. See below for a few examples of photos from their City Hall photo tour! This particular “cupcake” bridal photo was the couple’s idea. We have certainly done this before, but our bride insisted we do it this time and she had the appropriate wedding dress to pull it off! Please also notice that we put a remote light behind her veil which gives her that glow. Without that backlight this still would have been a great photo but a new dimension was added which separated her from the background.
Cutting The Wedding Cake at the Fairmont Hotel – San Francisco
After we completed all of our wedding pictures at beautiful San Francisco City Hall, we proceeded to our next destination which was the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill. Our newlyweds had selected the Fairmont Hotel as a place to stay since they were coming up from San Diego. They knew that the Fairmont was famous for Christmas decorations and they thought this would be the perfect place to take some pictures for their wedding and also to cut their cake. We drove with them to the Fairmont and took some amazing pictures around the building in and around all of the Christmas decorations including the famous life-size gingerbread house. Much to our surprise, the newlyweds had requested that the Fairmont set up an outdoor wedding cake for them out in the Beautiful rooftop area of the hotel. Once we had completed our pictures in the lobby area in and some of the nicely decorated always we captured photos of our couple cutting their cake. You can see one picture below from this fantastic setting. NOTE: Ever since Covid-19 caused all kinds of issues in San Francisco, Hotels now no longer allow non-guests to celebrate their wedding with pictures in the building.
Amazing San Francisco City Hall Couple
We truly had an amazing time with this San Francisco City Hall wedding couple. Some of the relationships that we have formed photographing weddings at this historic building have been very rewarding. This couple, in particular is one that we’ve stayed in touch with over the years. I was reminded about this great wedding after the bride contacted me requesting that we put together a wedding album for them. We offer all of our San Francisco City Hall photography clients the option of purchasing a professional custom made wedding album. In this particular case, the couple chose 40 photos from their wedding and then we will put together a beautiful album for them with the design that they get to review and approve. The size of this album was 8X11 but we can do different sizes depending on what our newlyweds want.