Marrying abroad: what changes at a destination wedding

Getting married abroad isn't the same as getting married at home with better scenery. Almost everything changes, and it's worth knowing before you book.

We're writing this with two of our own behind us: Katia and Federico in Tulum and Nara and Diogo in Fernando de Noronha.

Fewer come, and they stay longer

It's the first thing that changes and the one you feel most. When a wedding requires a flight and three nights in a hotel, the guest list shrinks on its own: the obligations drop away and the people who want to be there remain.

And since nobody travels that far to head home the same night, they stay. The wedding stops being one evening and becomes three or four days together.

It's the difference between guests attending a wedding and guests living it.

The day compresses

At a local wedding, getting ready can be unhurried. At a destination, everything happens in fewer hours: you arrive, you get ready, you marry and you celebrate almost back to back, often in the same place.

That has a practical consequence: there's one shot at each thing. There's no "we'll do it tomorrow". That's why we always arrive a day or two early: to walk the location, see where the light falls at the exact hour of the ceremony, and settle what happens if it rains.

Light matters more than ever

In Tulum the ceremony was outdoors with the sun going down. In Noronha, facing the Atlantic. In both cases the hour of the ceremony decided how the photographs look, far more than any other decision.

It's so decisive that we gave it its own piece: what time to set your ceremony.

We travel with everything, and with spares

This part is dull, but it's what separates a well-covered destination wedding from a serious problem: you can't rent a lens on an island.

We carry backup bodies, backup lenses, batteries, cards and drives. And we back the photographs up the same day, before sleeping, in more than one place. Failing gear can be worked around; a lost file can't.

What to settle in advance

1. Documents. Yours, your guests' and ours. Crossing a border with working equipment has its rules.
2. The real ceremony time, not the tentative one. Everything else follows from it.
3. An extra day, if possible. It makes room for a pre-wedding session on location, in different clothes and without rushing.
4. Who coordinates there. A local planner or the hotel itself. We'll work with whoever it is, but they need to exist.

What you take home

A destination wedding gives you photographs that look like nothing any of your friends have. Not because of a filter: because the place is part of the story.