What to do with your hands

Two weeks before a ceremony at Torre Capo Rama, a couple wrote to us with a single question, and it had nothing to do with paperwork or timings. It was this: what do we do with our hands. They had been picturing themselves standing on that headland in front of a celebrant with their arms hanging at their sides, and the image had started to bother them more than anything else on the schedule. It is the question we are asked most often in the last fortnight, and it deserves a serious answer, because almost everything that makes people look uncomfortable in photographs happens somewhere between the elbow and the fingertips.

The answer is that hands need a job. Cristiana opens every ceremony by asking the two of you to take each other's hands, and she does it before the first line is spoken rather than halfway through. That is not sentiment, it is engineering. Four hands holding four hands settles the distance between you, squares your shoulders, stops the fidgeting, and gives your arms a reason to exist. It also means that when your hands shake, and one of you will shake, the other one absorbs it. From two metres away nobody sees a tremor. They see two people holding on.

Stand closer than feels correct. Left alone, most couples place themselves about a metre apart, which is the distance you would use with a colleague. The right distance is roughly the length of a forearm. It feels excessive while you are doing it and looks entirely normal in every photograph afterwards. Cristiana will move you once, early, and then leave you alone. She also stands off the axis between the two of you and the sea, slightly to one side, so that Salvo is not shooting over her shoulder and neither of you is looking past a stranger to find the person you are marrying.

Empty your pockets first. The ring travels in an inside jacket pocket, never in trousers, because a small box in a trouser pocket is visible from across a field and you will touch it every ninety seconds without noticing. Phones come out entirely and go to whoever is carrying the bag. Sunglasses off, on your head or in the bag, not hanging from a collar. If you are holding a vow card, hold it in one hand and take your partner's hand with the other, and hand the card to Cristiana the moment you have finished with it rather than folding it away mid ceremony.

Look at each other. This sounds obvious and it is the thing people get wrong most consistently, because under pressure everyone turns towards whoever is talking. When Cristiana speaks, you do not need to face her. She will cue you by name when she needs your attention and by touch on the arm if the wind takes her voice. The camera never needs looking at. Salvo works at distance for the ceremony itself and you will lose track of where he is within about a minute, which is the intention.

Afterwards, in the portraits, you will be given something to do rather than a pose to hold. Salvo directs movement and never expression. Walk from the arch to the wall and stop when you get there. Turn round and come back slower. Stand here and talk to each other about anything at all. Nobody is ever told to look happy, because the face that arrives when someone asks for it is a face you will recognise as false a year later. If you want to see what that difference looks like across a set of images, /gallery is the honest version.

One practical note if your ceremony is anywhere near Scala dei Turchi or the marl at Punta Bianca. The white rock is slick, it is chalky, and it transfers onto everything. Walk in flat shoes, carry the good ones, and change at the top. Beyond that, bring less than you think you need. Tell us what you are worried about looking like and we will tell you honestly whether it is a real problem or one that solves itself in the first thirty seconds.