Beach Wedding Photography: The Definitive Guide

“Planning a beach wedding is challenging and expensive. One of the biggest costs and most disappointing aspects of our destination wedding was the photographer. Fortunately, we brought digital wedding cameras. Our digital wedding cameras and saved our wedding photography. Instead of getting zero good pictures from our photographer, we got over a thousand great pictures from our digital wedding cameras!”
     - Jocelyn English, Married  in Hawaii

Summary: Traditional beach wedding photography is risky, demanding, and expensive. A new destination wedding photography service reduces the risk, stress, and cost of beach wedding photography.

Read This If: You're having a beach or destination wedding and want great wedding pictures.

Introduction

When thinking about your beach wedding photography, or any destination wedding photography, it is very important to think about the four big beach wedding photography challenges:

1. The Distance Difference: A lot can go wrong thousands of miles from home
2. Lots to Photograph: There will be a lot to photograph besides your wedding ceremony
3. Lack of Experience: Many wedding photographers do not have experience photographing beach weddings
4. Travel Expenses: You have to pay wedding photographers’ travel costs

Thanks to these four major beach wedding photography challenges, many brides and grooms are looking for an affordable backup or alternative to traditional beach wedding photography.

Fortunately, in the rest of this article you will not only get a deep understanding of each of these four big challenges, but you will also learn about a new and affordable beach wedding photography alternative that addresses each of the four big challenges.

The Big Four Beach Wedding Photography Challenges

Beach Wedding Photography Challenge 1: The Distance Difference

Have you ever forgotten to pack something when you went on a trip? It is frustrating, but often fixable by making a quick stop at a local store. Unfortunately, it is not that simple when a wedding photographer forgets something. Professional photography equipment is not like toothpaste. A wedding photographer cannot swing by a local drug store and buy some if they forget it.

This means that if a wedding photographer forgets something, like we all do, your wedding pictures will suffer. If a piece of lighting equipment is missing, then you will have dark wedding pictures. If camera batteries come-up missing, then you will not have any wedding pictures.

The moral of this story is that we all forget things when we travel, but that this problem is much worse for wedding photographers. If they forget something, then you pay a terrible price: your wedding pictures.

So what do you do?

Backup your beach wedding photographer!

And you do not need to buy a bunch of professional photography equipment to do this. Instead, just grab a digital wedding camera package, and stick it in your luggage.

Video: Digital Wedding Camera Packages Work

When you arrive at your destination, open the package and give the digital wedding cameras out to your wedding party.

When you get back home, place the wedding cameras in the mail, and in about a week, all of your beach wedding photos will be available for free on a CD and on a free wedding photo and video sharing website.

Video: How Your Beach Wedding Photo and Video Sharing Website Works

Now, if your beach wedding photographer drops the ball, you still have your wedding party ensuring that you get great wedding pictures, and a great way to share all of your beach wedding pictures after your trip.

Of course, if cost is a major issue, you could skip the beach wedding photographer completely, just use digital wedding cameras, and save enough money to pay for your honeymoon. All inclusive digital wedding camera wedding photography packages only cost $495, and all of your digital prints are free. When you do the math, that is about $5,000 less than most beach wedding photographers, and $5,000 will buy you a very nice honeymoon!

Math aside, the key thing is that traditional beach wedding photographers are human, and humans forget things. But this type of mistake cannot compromise all of your wedding pictures! The most cost effective way to avoid this issue is to back-up or replace a traditional beach wedding photographer with digital wedding cameras.

Beach Wedding Photography Challenge 2: Lots to Photograph

One of the best parts of beach weddings is that your wedding will be the highpoint of an amazing vacation. Your friends and family are not fighting traffic to get to your ceremony. They are walking though emerald sand in flip flops. Your friends and family are not thinking about work the next day. They are thinking about the glass bottom boat trip they are taking with you the next day. In short, beach weddings are amazing because of the entire trip.

With amazing memories being made throughout the entire trip, it is critical to have a beach wedding photography service that will photograph your entire trip.

Put differently, you need to think about how get pictures taken for four to seven days instead of four to seven hours. And while you may be able to find a wedding photographer who will do this, it certainly will not be cheap. Most wedding photographers charge around two thousand dollars to photograph your wedding day, so if you want them to photography your entire trip, then you are looking at a ten to fifteen thousand dollar bill.

If you don’t have $15,000 to spend on pictures from your trip, then you have two options:

1. Hire a wedding photographer for your wedding day, and use your digital wedding cameras for candid shots throughout your entire trip.
2. Use digital wedding cameras for your wedding pictures as wells as candid shots throughout your entire trip.

The advantage of the first is that you get the best of both worlds: the artistic shots of a professional plus a lot of candid shots from your entire trip. The advantage of the second is cost: you get pictures from your entire trip for under $500.

Video: How Corina and Lincoln Got Pictures From Their Entire Wedding Week

Either way, just make sure that you think about your wedding photography in terms of your entire trip instead of just the day of your wedding. After all, the whole reason you are having a destination wedding is so that you and your friends and family have once-in-a-lifetime trip, not just a single day.

Beach Wedding Photography Challenge 3: Lack of Experience

Unfortunately, many wedding photographers have little if any experience photographing beach weddings. Even worse, many wedding photographers without beach wedding photography experience will charge you the same as wedding photographers with beach wedding photography experience. That doesn’t make sense. If you needed knee surgery, you wouldn’t pay an ear, nose, and throat doctor the same that you would pay a knee surgeon. Both have medical experience, but only one has experience that matters to you. The same thing applies to wedding photographers: do not pay for experience that doesn’t matter to your wedding.

Put differently, wedding photographers are expensive because they generally have a lot of experience photographing weddings. This is not at all the same as having a lot of experience photographing beach weddings. This is a very important distinction to make as you really do not want to pay for photography experience that doesn’t matter for your wedding.

For example, Joe Doe may have photographed a hundred weddings indoors in Iowa, but that does not help you at all if your wedding is on a beach in Tahiti. Beach lighting alone makes wedding photography a whole new ballgame. Throw in a sunset and wind, and all bets are off. The take-away is simple: if you are going to pay to bring a wedding photographer on your trip with you, then make sure that the wedding photographer has experience that matters to your wedding.

But what if you have trouble finding a wedding photographer with experience photographing weddings at your location? Then you have two choices:

1. Take your chances with an inexperienced wedding photographer at a cost of about $5,000
2. Take your chances with ten inexperienced photographers with digital wedding cameras at a cost of about $500

Both are going to be using digital cameras with preview screens--so either way you can see how the pictures are looking as they get taken--but the wedding photographer is about ten times more expensive than the digital wedding camera option. And you have to wonder what exactly it is that you are paying ten times more for if the wedding photographer has no more experience taking wedding pictures on the beach than your wedding party.

Beach Wedding Photography Challenge 4: Travel Expenses

If you want a wedding photographer on the beach with you, then you have to pay to get the photographer and their assistants on the beach with you. Given that beach weddings are expensive already, paying for a trip for a photography crew can be quite the financial stretch.

If you are not a fan of paying for a vacation for your photographer and her crew, then you can do one of two things:

1. Use an on-site photographer
2. Use digital wedding cameras

If you go with an on-site photographer, then think very carefully about who you choose to work with since you will at best meet with them a day or two before your wedding, and will likely be unable to take practice shots with them. That is, you will not have a good feel for their style or skill, nor will you feel super comfortable having them take your picture. And please remember that anyone can post pretty pictures on their website. Just because an on-site photographer has nice wedding pictures on their website, that does not mean that that is what your pictures will look like, or that the on-site photographer even took those pictures!

Good photographers need to get to know you and need to practice with you to ensure that they take great pictures at your wedding. Since most on-site photographers cannot provide this, you may want to think twice before betting your wedding photography on them.

Considering all the risks and uncertainty that come with on-site photographers, and the travel costs that come with traditional wedding photographers, you may be better off simply putting a set of digital wedding cameras in your carry-on bag.

Conclusion

Getting pictures from your beach wedding can be risky and expensive. Before deciding on your beach wedding photography it is important to answer these four questions:

1. What will you do if your wedding photographer forgets something?
2. What will you do if your wedding photographer cannot capture all of the memories from your entire trip?
3. What will you do if your wedding photographer lacks beach experience?
4. What will you do if your wedding photographer makes you pay for their trip?

After answering these four key questions, many brides and grooms determine that they need a backup plan for their beach wedding photographer, or that they need a more affordable alternative to a beach wedding photographer. Digital wedding cameras do a great job backing-up photographers, and are certainly a more affordable alternative.

The bottom line is that you will spend an amazing amount of time and money on a beach wedding, and therefore should enjoy and remember every second of it. To ensure this, I highly recommend that you think about the four big beach wedding photography challenges and that you do not put all of your beach wedding photography eggs in one photographer’s basket.

- Jonathan Bailor

PS You may also want to check out the handy Wedding Photography Quiz which helps you easily pick the best photography option for your wedding.

 

About the Author: Jonathan Bailor is the Managing Partner of the premier affordable wedding photography service CameraRenter.

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