Wedding at the Pawleys Island Chapel with a reception at the Reserve Harbor Yacht Club

This bride and groom, Mary and Shane, had a beautiful wedding ceremony at the Pawleys Island Chapel with a reception at the Reserve Harbor Yacht Club. They also had their two daughters featured as flower girls in the wedding. I had my assistant head over to take pictures with the groomsmen, and I went to the home where the bride was getting ready on the inlet in Pawleys Island. This home was in a beautiful location with a dock on the water. Because I didn’t have to take pictures with the groomsmen, it gave me an extra few minutes to fly my drone. I took several aerial photos of the north end of Pawleys that turned out nice.

The chapel on the marsh in Pawleys Island is always an excellent location for a ceremony, as long as it isn’t high tide! Photography in a backlit place like the Pawleys Island Chapel is always tricky. A camera set to auto will see the bright light coming in windows and try to expose for that, making everyone inside the chapel extremely dark. In this circumstance, I have to shoot on manual and take control of the exposure myself. Even if you properly expose for the dark interior of the chapel, there will be a bright overexposed glow coming through the windows. That is why I always like to shoot a few quick shots at multiple exposures; then they can be combined into a high-dynamic range picture in Photoshop. It’s similar to HDR on the phone except with much more control and range.

This was my first time doing photography at the Reserve Harbor Yacht Club in Pawleys Island. Hidden beside the boat docks is a boardwalk that winds through the woods and down along the edge of the water. It’s always a magical look for pictures when a walkway disappears into the distance. We had to rush because it was almost sunset when we made it to the boardwalk for photos, and the sky was cloudy and about to rain. The sun peeked out from the clouds for just a few minutes for perfect pictures of the couple right at the end. I’m really happy the rain held off just long enough! I hope you enjoy the pictures below.