destination wedding: Go local or import?
July 31, 2008
“If you fly in only one vendor, make it the photographer. Since so many of the dealings with your shutterbug will take place after the wedding (…ordering prints, assembling albums, etc.), it’s actually more convenient to have that professional based near you. And if you use a local photographer in another country and something goes wrong (worst-case scenario: He or she loses the film [sic]), you’ll have little or no legal recourse. Also, as a stylistic consideration, American wedding photographers tend to have a much more journalistic style than many of their foreign counterparts (who often take more traditional, posed photos), so if you’re marrying abroad and would like your photos to have a natural, candid look, you may want to fly in a photographer.”
-the Knot Guide to Destination Weddings (p. 70)
While I absolutely do not want to be referred to as ‘your shutterbug’ I will travel joyfully to your location of choice and create extraordinary photographic art with and for you. This wedding that you’re investing a bazillion dollars into? I’m pretty sure that resort package photographer who gives you an hour of time isn’t necessarily going to capture all the moments. (And for the record, it’s not all fancy umbrella drinks on the beach for your import photographers… see Nick Haskin’s entry about why destination photography is actually not a vacation for the photographer.)
What excites me about traveling and learning about different cultural traditions is that I come at each experience with wide open eyes. I am delighted by the colors and smells and deep symbolic imagery from a South Asian or Pakistani wedding celebration. I am enamored by the drinking songs the old Irish grandfather will bust out. I am totally incredulous at how many times a couple will prostrate themselves in a traditional Korean bowing ceremony. Checking out the special details a couple places around the ceremony and reception, traveling to a new place and scouting unfamiliar streets for artistic and funky bridal portraits… I discovered in previous years that when I happened to come across these situations at my wedding commissions, I completely came alive.
And when you completely come alive, you know you are connecting with a deep calling written into your soul. I cling to this delight, wonder, and electricity I experienced in the first few years of my business. Reflection upon those windows of joy prompted this year’s change in emphasis to encourage ethnic and destination wedding commissions.
So who is ‘ethnic’ enough? What is a ‘destination’ wedding?
Good questions! I like to say that I specialize in documenting the joyful collision of cultures. There’s no straightforward definition of destination, nor of what constitutes an ethnic wedding. Your wedding might happen two blocks from my own flat in Boston or three thousand miles away in a place I need to purchase special adapters just to charge up the necessary accoutrements. The collision might be a bunch of Texans celebrating a wedding in the Caribbean, or a Japanese doctor marrying a Croatian scientist (true story!).
I want to live at the intersection where two people join their families and lives - that point of merge. I love to experience this cultural collision of lives and traditions and food preferences… I love to laugh with your British granny who is smoking her marlboros in her big elegant British lady hat. I love to be on the dance floor when the Irish groom is showing off his Bollywood-inspired dance moves to his new bride’s cousins.
You know who you are, my dear target client base.
Posted in destination, wisdom