Here's our best tip: Take lots of memory cards with you. If you have lots of memory capacity available, you can stop "chimping" (constantly looking at your camera's LCD to see how the photo you just took turned out) and concentrate on what’s going around you. While you're checking your photos and deleting the poor ones you're likely to miss the best moments. Sort your photos later.
Use your optical zoom (not your digital zoom) to get in close whenever you can. Forget about including legs and background objects when you photograph people. Pants and church steeples aren't particularly interesting - emotions and expressions are.
If you're using the long end of your lens to magnify the image, remember this will magnify your own body movements as well, increasing the blurring caused by camera shake. Learn to hold your camera steady and your percentage of "keepers" will go up.
Go where the light is: outdoors, near entrances, by windows. Even if you're using flash, adding natural light always improves a photo.
Try taking some shots where your target isn’t in the center of the frame. Focus on the eyes of your subject and then recompose to put them exactly where you want them. Keep background clutter out of the shot, put more space on the side of the frame a person is looking towards, and take advantage of dramatic diagonals and other “ambient” framing.
Take lots of photos. Experiment. Be ready. Watch for and try to anticipate moments of meaning or emotion.
And don't worry about taking photos of the cake or the flower arrangements, unless you're particularly interested in those types of photos. (Because some can be spectacular.)
Instead, focus on people - and on candid moments. When you get home and look through your photos, the ones that will make you smile are the ones you took that captured the personalities of your family and friends.
