Dreams Playa Mujeres Wedding Photographer

Start With Who Is Coming, and the Wedding Picks Itself

Almost every enquiry we get from this resort begins with a headcount rather than a date, because the guest list is what decides the shape of the day. Three versions cover nearly all of them, and each has its own guide.

The Full Wedding, and the Day It Takes to Photograph It

Getting ready in the suite, the walk out to the gazebo, vows, the group portraits nobody wants to rush, dinner and the dance floor — one or two photographers, depending on how many of you there are. Our destination wedding photography timeline shows how the hours actually fall, including the gap we protect for the golf-course portraits.

When Twenty Guests Are the Whole Wedding

A small wedding at a big resort is a good trade: the venues are the same, the timeline loosens, and the portrait window stretches to fill whatever is left of the light. Read the intimate wedding guide, or the guide to eloping in Cancún if the guest list is just the two of you.

Renewing Vows on the Anniversary Trip

Couples come back to this resort with the children who were not born the first time round, and say the words again on the sand. Paperwork disappears, the mood is lighter, and the photographs are every bit a wedding. Our vow renewal guide covers how we build the hour.

The Resort Put Golf in Its Name, and We Put It in the Wedding Album

Dreams Playa Mujeres Golf & Spa Resort is not a marketing flourish: the property shares its address with the Playa Mujeres Golf Club, the Greg Norman course laid out through this stretch of coast north of Cancún, and guests of the hotel play it at a preferential green fee. Confirm access arrangements for a wedding party with your coordinator, as they vary by package.

What that means for us is simpler than it sounds. Every other wedding gallery on this coast is built from the same three ingredients — white sand, blue water, palm — and by the fortieth frame the eye stops registering them. Twenty minutes on the course and the palette changes completely: cool green, long shadows across turf, a stand of trees, still water. Same wedding, same dress, same afternoon; a set of pictures that does not look like anybody else's.

Grass and Sand Do Not Take the Same Wedding Light

Golden hour — the soft, warm stretch either side of sunset — is when most of a wedding gallery is made, and we usually ask for the ceremony to begin around two hours before the sun goes down so vows, family groupings and the couple's portraits all land inside it. On sand that light bounces: the beach throws it back up under the chin and does half the work of a reflector. Turf absorbs it instead, so the same hour reads deeper and more saturated on the course than it does on the shoreline, and skin needs a little more help. Knowing which of the two we are standing on changes how we light you.

The other variable is the calendar. Sunset drifts by close to an hour and a half between midwinter and midsummer, so a start time that finishes in gold in February finishes in the dark in June. We set yours against the real sunset for your date. Our guide to the best months for a Cancún wedding maps that drift, along with heat and sargassum.

Put the Outside Wedding Photographer Fee in Writing Before Anything Else

Resorts in this bracket normally charge a fee when the wedding photographer is not the in-house one, or admit them on a paid day pass. It is a routine line item and worth pinning down early, in writing, so it sits in the budget from the beginning rather than arriving as a surprise from the coordinator. We break the whole subject down in our guide to outside-photographer vendor fees at Cancún resorts, and we set the independent route beside the packaged one in resort photographer versus your own.

A Legal Wedding at Home, the Ceremony Everyone Sees Here

Plenty of couples marry legally in their own town on a Tuesday and hold the symbolic ceremony here in front of everyone who travelled. A civil marriage in Mexico is entirely possible and we photograph those too, but it brings witnesses, documents and a stricter clock. Either way it changes when the ceremony can start, so decide it before we draft the timeline rather than after.

Travelling with relatives who want their own morning on the beach around the wedding? Our Dreams Playa Mujeres photographer page covers the group and portrait work we do on the same shoreline, and for something more editorial before checkout there is a flying dress photoshoot at Dreams Playa Mujeres.