It is a few years after this Barcelo Maya Palace Deluxe wedding took place. As a Toronto wedding photographer, I love when I have the opportunity to shoot a destination wedding. This particular Barcelo wedding was phenomenal! Anywhere I went in the resort I could find perfect backdrops to create beautiful wedding photos. This creative picture of the bridal party on the rocky beach across from the Coral Grill. This particular image won a prestigious Canadian photography award and is one of my favourites from that day. I stayed for about a week at this beautiful resort and I spent a lot of time with the bridal party so I got to know them fairly well. In fact we are still friends even today!!!
This wedding on Riviera Maya took place in September when the wedding is unstable in this part of the world. It rained every day early afternoon and while I love tropical rain, it is a well known fact that photographic equipment does not do well in such climate conditions. The sand, the salty water and humidity can quickly damage a camera...but I digress. After the wedding ceremony, we had about 1 hour to take bride and groom portraits. Unfortunately, it rained for a while, so we missed about 20 minutes. While I had a plan and scouted several locations in the beautiful Barcelo Maya Palace Deluxe resort, we had no time for that, so we simply headed to the beach. Fortunately, there was no one on the beach as it was raining on and off, so we could proceed without interruption.
For this photo I vividly remember asking a Mexican videographer to hold my flash while I stepped into the ocean and literally lowered the camera to touch the water in order to get the reflection of the groomsmen while the bridesmaids surrounded the bride and were having fun. Fortunately, my camera survived the encounter with the ocean and I managed to create a gorgeous wedding picture for the bride and groom.
This is truly an image created while I was touched by the photography gods. From a composition standpoint there are a few elements that add value to this shot. First, reflection of the groomsmen in the foreground makes this image unique. Second, the image tells multiple stories: the groomsmen in the foreground pose for the camera while the bride and the bridesmaids have fun in the background. The image resembles a band photograph and features three subjects. They create a triangle, a composition element that is well known to make photos visually appealing. Also, according to the rule of odds, an odd number of subjects makes a photo more powerful. The three subjects here are the groomsmen, the bridesmaids and the groomsmen's reflection.
Some technical details for wedding photographers: This photo was taken with a 5D Mark III, a 24-70 2.8 v2 lens and a single flash held as I mentioned before by a videographer.
I submitted this photo to the fall competition the same year and got the fourth place in the Professional Wedding Photographers of Canada contest, Bridal Party section.
Website: www.barcelo.com
Location: Carretera Chetumal - Puerto Juárez Km. 266.3, 77750 Solidaridad Riviera Maya, Q.R., Mexico.
