13 Wedding Blogs for Planning a Rad Wedding
Our Wedding back in 2018!
Portland Wedding Photographer: The Best Wedding Blogs for Planning Your Wedding
Living in Portland, Oregon—and working as wedding photographers ourselves—added an unexpected layer of challenge when we began planning our own wedding, especially in the quest to find the right photographer. At first, we scrolled through Instagram and attended local bridal shows for inspiration, striving to see things from a non-photographer’s perspective. While Instagram can be a fantastic starting point, we found its diversity lacking (too many feeds featured only slimcouples, which left us feeling excluded).
As an alternative, we turned to wedding blogs—and that decision made all the difference. Wedding blogs offered a broader, more inclusive range of ideas and photographers, helping us discover styles and vendors we might have missed otherwise. If you’re planning your wedding in Portland (or anywhere else), here’s why wedding blogs might be the perfect tool to help you find real inspiration, connect with vendors who celebrate inclusivity, and plan the day of your dreams.
We picked these blogs as some of them helped inspire our 2018 elopement, and as wedding photographers we are always looking for helpful blogs to suggest to our clients. We know not all weddings look the same and we felt that these wedding blogs provided diversity in budget, body type, and style. The thing I (amber) struggled with when trying to envision my wedding was seeing someone who looked like me in the blogs. For me Off-Beat Bride inspired me so much as I saw other plus sized brides and I felt empowered, it made wedding planning fun!
Most blogs rarely capture Portland, Oregon’s unique climate and approach to weddings, so I found it to be more important to focus on unique over traditional weddings. But there is a ton of value as they have a lot of good advice that fits every wedding.
Below is a list of our personal favorite wedding blogs.
It was nice to see so many different styles, budgets, locations and ideas for elopements and weddings. Not all were for us but it was a great starting point. Our first draft for our wedding was a summer camping wedding that had 150 guests and we were sure it was going to be 250 by the time we added everyone. As soon as we realized that we got overwhelmed and decided to elope in just 3 weeks which then turned into a micro wedding. It was nice to see and read other peoples stories which helped empowered us to do something different!
For our wedding we had it in our community room in our apartment with 32 of our closest family and friends. We had drinks and tacos, the whole thing lasted just a few hours then we went to a local bar with friends to do karaoke until midnight. It was nice to get formals with each guest, mingle with everyone and not break the bank. The biggest advice is go with the flow, so much went wrong but in the end it went right as we had the best day ever! Being in the wedding industry it’s a lot like a family, so everyone helped in their own way.
