There’s a version of destination weddings where a couple flies to the Amalfi Coast, or the hills outside Florence, or a resort on the Yucatán Peninsula – and hires whoever is available locally. It works. The photos exist. But there’s something that gets lost when your photographer meets you for the first time on the morning of your wedding.
As a destination wedding photographer, I’ve shot weddings in Mexico, Europe, and across Canada – Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Banff. And I’ve traveled widely enough — from Hawaii to India to throughout Europe — to know that great light exists everywhere, and that working in an unfamiliar place is something you either know how to do or you don’t.
When I’m hired to travel to a wedding, I’ve usually spent months in conversation with that couple before we’re ever in the same room. I know how they move, what they care about, what kind of images they actually want to walk away with. By the time we’re standing in the late afternoon light on a beach in Cancun or watching the sun drop behind the Irish countryside, I’m not figuring out who they are. I’m just paying attention to what’s happening.
That familiarity changes everything about the images.
Consistency across the whole weekend.
Most of the weddings I photograph as a destination wedding photographer now are multi-day weekends, which can encompass a welcome dinner, the wedding day itself, and a morning-after brunch. The story isn’t just the ceremony. It’s the last song of the night when everyone’s stopped caring about how they look. It’s the quiet the morning after, when the whole experience is behind you.
A local photographer hired for the wedding day captures a day. A photographer who travels to be there captures a weekend – and those are two very different things.
Related: Multi-day destination wedding weekend on the Yucatán Peninsula
The light is different everywhere. The approach doesn’t change.
There’s something particular about the way afternoon light hits the water at a resort on the Yucatán Peninsula – low, golden, almost cinematic. It’s completely different from the diffused grey softness of an overcast day in the Irish countryside, or the sharp clarity you get at altitude in the Rockies, or the warm indoor glow of a candlelit evening at a château in the countryside. Every location has its own quality of light, its own atmosphere, its own pace.
What doesn’t change is how I work. Quietly. Close. Paying attention to what’s actually happening rather than engineering moments that aren’t there. That consistency of approach, presence, and the relationship we’ve already built before I ever board a flight is what makes the images feel like yours, regardless of where they were made.
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The couples who reach out for a destination wedding photographer tend to know what they want.
You’re not looking for someone to show up and execute a shot list. You’ve planned something intentional, whether it’s a setting that means something, a guest list that had to work to get there, or simply a celebration that was never going to be generic. You want photographs that reflect that: images that feel like the weekend actually felt, not like a highlight reel of expected moments.
That’s the work I find most rewarding. Not because the locations are beautiful (though they are), but because the couples who invite me into those weekends tend to care deeply about how they’re remembered. And that care shows up in the images.
