I often go to the Grande Dunes Ocean Club in Myrtle Beach for wedding photography. It is my most visited location. The weekend of this wedding, I had three other weddings at the Ocean Club and one the following week. The nice thing is I know all the staff and all the good picture spots, as I mentioned in one of my earlier blog posts. During this ceremony, I also set up a camera on the upstairs balcony to shoot pictures during the entire ceremony. This time I set the camera to take a shot every 5 seconds instead of every 10 seconds to get a smoother time-lapse.
In the pictures below, you will find my typical bride in the doorway and window light shots I always like to do. There are many great windows in the bride and groom dressing rooms upstairs at the Ocean Club. The groomsmen were a lot of fun, and I got some crazy shots of them goofing around before the ceremony.
The other nice thing about doing the overhead time-lapse is that I can pull out individual pictures from the series. I posted a couple of these overhead pictures from during the ceremony below. In the images from later in the evening, I had the groomsmen lift the bride, so the girls wanted to lift the groom as well. They made it look pretty easy. I also really liked the shot of the bridal party sitting together on the beach walkway. Finally, I loved some of the sunset pictures of the couple behind the Ocean Club and in front of the dunes, as well as the bride jumping and spinning around in the arms of the groom in front of the ocean.
The only bad thing is the DJ had colored lights during the first dance, which makes a weird color cast on everything, but I’ve learned to work around this some with flash, and it’s not that bad. I typically recommend no overhead DJ lights during the first dance and parent dances, but that is entirely up to you and something to decide with the DJ. I hope you enjoy the pictures below.