Generations Riviera Maya Wedding Photographer

Which Wedding Fits the People You Are Bringing

The guest list decides more here than the venue does. A resort where three-bedroom suites are ordinary attracts a particular kind of celebration, and these are the three we are asked for most often, each with a guide of its own:

The Full Wedding, With the Whole Household In It

Getting ready in one suite instead of four scattered rooms, the first look, vows on the sand or under the chapel roof, cocktails, dinner and a dance floor that stays busy long after the smallest guests have gone up to bed. A second photographer joins once the list grows past what one pair of hands can follow. Our destination wedding photography timeline shows how the hours get spaced so that nothing has to be chased.

A Small Wedding, or Slipping Away Altogether

A dozen people around one table, or nobody at all except the two of you. A shorter guest list buys back the thing a big reception never returns: an unhurried portrait hour with nothing queued behind it. Begin with the intimate wedding guide, or our guide to eloping on this coast if the plan is to tell everyone once it is done.

Renewing Vows in Front of the Grandchildren

Couples come back to a resort like this one for the anniversary with people who did not exist the first time round, and the photographs are unmistakably different for it — less nerve, more noise. Lighter paperwork, identical coverage. Our vow renewal guide sets out how we plan one.

Suites Big Enough That the Whole List Sleeps in One Place

Generations is an all-suite, oceanfront property built by Karisma for households that travel as a unit: one-, two- and three-bedroom suites with a separate living room, a butler attached to each cluster of them, and — the part that matters on a wedding day — the Eko Kids Club, the Little Eko Chefs sessions and a lounge for teenagers, all running through the hours that would otherwise leave a nine-year-old bored by four in the afternoon.

What that hands us is unusual, and worth planning around. The morning does not scatter. The dress, the suits, a grandmother’s hairpins and three overexcited cousins are normally inside the same suite, so the getting-ready hours photograph as one continuous scene rather than as a relay between floors. Nobody drives anywhere for the ceremony either, which means the day never loses half an hour to a car park — and every hour a wedding does not lose is an hour that goes back into the pictures.

Golden Hour, Bedtime, and the Wedding Timeline That Serves Both

The warm, forgiving light that wedding portraits need arrives late — the last stretch of afternoon and the first minutes after the sun has dropped — and on the beach in front of the resort we usually put the ceremony a solid two hours ahead of that, which leaves room for vows, group pictures and a portrait set that is not being rushed. None of that is negotiable. Almost everything else is, and with small children in the wedding party the difference matters: a portrait set that overruns costs a three-year-old their nap, and a nap that overruns costs you the light.

Then the calendar interferes. Sundown wanders by the better part of ninety minutes between the shortest days of the year and the longest, so a start time that finishes in gold in one season finishes in the dark in another; we anchor every wedding timeline to the true sunset for your own date rather than to a round hour. Our longer look at the best months for a wedding on this coast tracks that drift through the year, with straight talk about heat and sargassum.

The Wedding Photographer Who Is Not on the Resort List

One question deserves an early answer in writing: what the resort asks of a photographer who is not on its own list. The usual answers are a photographer fee or a paid day pass — neither unusual, neither a reason to settle for a name you did not pick — and you simply want it agreed with the coordinator while the date is still months away. Everything we know about how those charges work is in our guide to outside-photographer vendor fees at Mexican resorts, and the case for choosing rather than inheriting your photographer is set out in resort photographer versus your own.

There is a second reason it matters at a resort like this one. A photographer meeting your relatives for the first time at the ceremony sees a crowd. The one you chose has already heard, in that first conversation, which uncle will not sit down and which child will not let go of a hand. While you are deciding things: whether guests film the vows on their phones is worth settling early too, and our note on the unplugged ceremony covers how to ask without anyone taking offence.

Legal on Paper, or a Symbolic Ceremony in Front of Everyone

This choice sets the clock for the rest of the day. A civil marriage in Mexico brings documents, witnesses and a tighter schedule; a good number of couples handle the legal part at home instead and hold a symbolic ceremony on the sand here, which photographs identically and leaves the afternoon looser. Settle it before we draft the timeline, because it governs the hour the ceremony can begin.

Two more calls are cheaper made now than later: whether the dress gets a second outing the next morning for a trash-the-dress session before it is folded away, and, for same-sex couples, what an LGBTQ+ wedding actually looks like on this coast. You can plan all of it from your own kitchen table — we deal with the resort’s events team at this end — and the first time we are all in the same room is usually the week of the wedding itself.