Fun but windy wedding day at the Grande Dunes Ocean Club & a new photo booth

It’s great to be back at the Grande Dunes Ocean Club in Myrtle Beach. This was my first wedding of 2018 at this location. It’s also great to be working again with some of the best wedding vendors in Myrtle Beach. That includes wedding planner Sarah McCall of Stunning and Brilliant Events, DJ Ryan Robinson of Globaltruth Entertainment, and Samantha Huff at the Ocean Club. I’m making this blog post in the middle of Hurricane Florence, so I’m really hoping my power stays on. It’s only a category 1 now, so I’m not too worried. While it wasn’t hurricane-force winds for this Ocean Club wedding, we had one of the windiest days of the summer for the wedding ceremony! The bride and groom stayed positive, and we ended up with a lot of great wedding pictures from the day.

I always love getting ready pictures of the bride and groom at the Ocean Club because of all the window light in the dressing rooms. I got some great shots of the bride and bridesmaids on the Ocean Club balcony and inside with the natural light from the large windows. The bride and groom wanted to do a first look before the ceremony so we decided to do it by the columns in front of the main entrance. This actually worked really well, and I got some great emotional shots of the bride walking up and putting her arms around the groom. Doing pictures in this area as well as on the hill over to the side of the club, kept us out of the wind and helped everyone’s hair stay nice, at least until the ceremony.

With the strong wind, we actually ended up with some really great shots of the bride’s dress blowing that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. I did a lot of Photoshop work on one picture so that even though the bride’s dress was blowing, the groom’s jacket tails were lying down flat. On windy days at the beach, there is a constant ocean salt spray. I kept trying to keep my camera lenses out of the wind, but by the end, they were coated in a salt film. A tip if you get a slight haze on your lenses from the salt, the dehaze slider in Lightroom can work magic. With a little contrast and dehaze adjustment, you can hardly even tell the lens was dirty.

I arrived at this wedding about 45 min early to set up a new photo booth system I recently built. I didn’t charge this bride and groom for the Photo Booth because this was just a test run. My wife, Lizeth, came along to help me set up and operate the booth. I’ve got a nice collection of a lot of the typical photo booth props. I’ve also got a couple of unique ones that everyone seemed to love, including a Mickey and Minnie bride and groom hat that my wife bought at Disney World. I’ve also got a genuine Colombian sombrero and poncho that I bought on my trip to Colombia, I forgot to bring them this time, but I’m going to in the future.

Everything went pretty well with the Photo Booth, but I’ve now made a couple of improvements. I now have a much wider photo backdrop as well as switching to a real camera instead of relying on the iPad Pro camera to take the pictures. Now the pictures from the Photo Booth will look almost like professional shots instead of like snapshots. The quality is not so important for the small Photo Booth prints that the guests are getting at the wedding, but the professional quality pictures will be great when they get to download them after the wedding in full resolution! I hope you enjoy the pictures below. Let me know in the comments if you do!