The marriage commissioner plays an important role in making sure the couple's ceremony photos come out right. Before we go into detail about how this works I should first let you know that San Francisco City Hall officiants are volunteers. So whatever we can get out of them is a huge advantage. Since they are in fact, volunteers we try to not ask them to do too much for us. We fully understand that they are not there to help the wedding photographer, but only are supposed to complete a successful ceremony. That being said, the marriage commissioner is always center stage in any City Hall wedding ceremony picture. As you can see in the photo above, the commissioner stands facing the camera while giving instructions and helping the bride and groom recite their vows. The point here is that it makes a tremendous difference if the officiant is smiling and appears to enjoy what is happening in front of them. We have seen both types of situations at City Hall, but for the most part the officiants are cheerful, happy and encouraging. The image shown here displays how much greater the end result can be when you have a smiling officiant. It truly appears like he is enjoying what he's doing and the couple as well. Again, we can't really ask the marriage commissioner to smile for us but just wanted to reveal the to you the effectiveness of when they do. It really changes the look and feel of the whole photo and turns it into a positive. This happens to be one of our favorite marriage commissioners and we have known him for close to ten years and he is fantastic