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What you need to know… About shooting beach weddings.
I think I better begin by introducing myself! I’m Joanna Banks-Morgan with Diva Productions in Panama City Beach, Florida. That’s in the panhandle of the Florida peninsula if you’ve never heard of Panama City Beach. We live on a coastline, which is consistently rated one of the top 10 beach destinations in the United States, and every spring and summer we are inundated with families coming to our area to vacation. What we’ve found over the years is that as the children in those families grow up, and as they start their adult lives, they often want to come back to the place where they enjoyed their happiest childhood memories to get married. Because of this we primarily serve the destination wedding market along a stretch of sand known as 30A. The majority of our ceremonies are shot on the sand and over the years we’ve accumulated a fair bit of knowledge and experience on the subject! So today I’m going to kick off my series of blog posts for In[Focus] called “What you need to know…” with “What you need to know… About shooting beach weddings.”
PROTECTING YOUR GEAR
First off, bag your tripod legs. As an industry we spend thousands of dollars on our gear, so the last thing we want to do is stick a $1000 tripod in the sand. We don’t have a fancy method for protecting the legs, we simply cover the bottom of them with freezer bags, secure them with rubber bands, then wrap plenty of duct tape around the freezer bags as extra layers. It’s not pretty, but it works. Last year we got caught out with high wind and had the wind blowing sand and sea spray all over our gear. We tried to clean the sand off ourselves, but the telescopic legs are a law unto themselves and we had to send the tripod (minus the head) back to Miller for repair. It cost us around $150. Not a fortune, but we had another wedding the week after, so it was an unwelcome expense and inconvenient. But like every wedding we shoot, we learned something. What we learned that day was to also have a couple of garbage bags ready to throw over the gear in case of high wind, sea spray, or rain. We’ve also written a clause into our contract about wind, we used to just have one about rain, but now we realize the wind blowing sand and sea spray on our gear is just as bad.
And you know that monopod you love so much with the feet? Don’t bring it anywhere near the beach. Sand gets everywhere, particularly in those little stabilizing mechanisms, which make these monopods such a favorite in our industry. Also along the lines of protecting your gear, if you don’t already have UV filters on your lenses, you need to get them. I know you know this, but it bears repeating – sand will scratch glass!
If you are shooting on your own, be wary of unmanned cameras because all it takes is one Uncle Bob knocking a tripod leg or standing directly in front of your camera to ruin the unmanned shot. We quit putting a third camera on the beach ages ago because it seemed like this was happening constantly. Occasionally, we can get a third camera onto a safe balcony for a high + wide shot but that’s really the only truly safe place for an unmonitored camera (IMO).
AUDIO ISSUES
Secondly, you’ve got to mic both the officiant and the groom. Chances are, if you are shooting on the sand, this is a destination wedding for you, so you are trying to keep your gear light and portable. However, a beach wedding is not the time to skimp on your audio sources. You are going to need that back up mic more that ever. Why? Well, because most couples like to get married at or near sunset and that is when the wind really picks up along our coastlines. Unfortunately, the mics’ windscreen is just not enough to eliminate wind noise. However, if you mic both the officiant and the groom, the likelihood is one of their bodies will be blocking the wind and you should be able to get a clean feed off of one of the two mics. Kat Small of Cinema Chic Productions told me once that during her years in Hawaii filming beach weddings she learned to take a piece of panty house and secure around the mic before she would put the windscreen on to help cut down on wind noise.
And if anyone asks me about plugging into a board, I’m going to roll around on the floor laughing! We have never had an opportunity to do that for a beach ceremony. If by some small miracle the service is amplified by a competent sound technician, be sure to check your channels with them.
NO SHIRTS, NO SHOES? BIG PROBLEM.
Thirdly, what you wear is important. Other vendors notice whether or not you look professional, and so do the guests. We constantly hear complaints from wedding planners about photographers who don’t “dress” for a beach wedding and turn up in shorts and flip-flops. I hear those photographers saying, “Well, our couple was cool with it.” What they’re not considering is the planner is an excellent referral source for future clients. Besides it’s a wedding and if the men in the bridal party are sweltering in suits, the least you can do is put on a pair of pants (for our British colleagues I mean “trousers”) and be respectful of the occasion. I tend to wear cotton dresses with a pair of shorts underneath. I like shooting low angles, so the shorts underneath the dress are essential to my not embarrassing myself. My partner Rob, and colleague Celia Hilton of Hilton Heads Productions in Pensacola, prefer light trousers and a shirt.
Finally, carry a bag with you that you can keep on your body the entire time you are on the beach. I have a Shootsac (which I love) but I’m not necessarily storing lenses in it. I stuff water, extra batteries, extra cards, my Zacuto Z-Finder, bug spray, garbage bags (in case we get a sudden rain) and a canister of compressed air (in case anything gets dropped in the sand) into it. If you are used to shooting at venues where you can dump cards or recharge batteries you’ve got to keep in mind there is absolutely no way to do that. You have to be prepared and stocked with clear cards and charged batteries.
Hope you’ve found the videolog and the article helpful! Watch out for my next post which will be “What you need to know… About filming with Super 8mm.”
