The short answer: start your ceremony 60 to 90 minutes before sunset, and sixty is better than ninety.
That’s the one number most couples never get told, and it decides more about how your photographs look thanthe venue, the flowers or the dress. But “before sunset” means something different in Antigua than it does inTuscany, and there are places where it means nothing at all. So here’s the longer version, from weddings in morethan forty countries.
The Caribbean and the Mediterranean are not the same problem
People assume warm is warm. They’re completely different days to plan.
In the Caribbean the sun goes down early and fast. Sunset is around 18:00 most of the year, give or take, andit barely moves between seasons. More importantly, the light disappears quickly after it: at those latitudes the sundrops almost straight down through the horizon, so you get roughly twenty minutes of usable light after sunsetand then it’s night. And the heat does not leave with the sun. At 20:00 it is still genuinely hot.
In the Mediterranean in summer the opposite is true. Sunset is somewhere between 20:30 and 21:45depending how far west you are — a wedding in Greece and a wedding in southern Spain can be more than anhour apart on the same date. The sun sets at a shallower angle, so you get closer to forty minutes of good lightafterwards. And the temperature drops the moment the sun goes. In September, and certainly in October, it can gofrom uncomfortably hot in the afternoon to genuinely cold an hour after sunset. Guests in summer dresses feel it.
So: in the Caribbean, plan for an early ceremony and a hot evening. In Europe, plan for a late ceremony and tellyour guests to bring something for their shoulders.
One thing that isn’t a problem either way: we like daylight and we like night. Natural light and flash are bothtools we use happily, and some of the best frames of a wedding happen well after dark. The hour of the ceremonyisn’t about avoiding difficulty. It’s about giving the most emotional twenty minutes of your day the light itdeserves.
What happens where the sun barely sets
If you’re marrying in Norway, Iceland or Scotland in June, “an hour before sunset” stops being useful advice. Farenough north there is no real sunset at all for weeks.
The rule still works, it just changes shape: avoid the middle of the day. When the sun is high, it’s hot, peoplesweat, and it throws hard shadows under eyes and noses — the least flattering light there is. What you want is thesun low, whatever hour that happens to be. Low sun is softer, warmer and far more cinematic, and in the far norththat window is enormous. You can have a ceremony at 21:00 and still be shooting in beautiful light at midnight.
Off-season weddings
We’ve photographed weddings in the snow, and weddings in Central America and the Caribbean during the rainyseason. There are places in Europe where the sun sets at 16:30 in winter and at 22:00 in summer. The rule doesn’tchange, the clock does — you just build the day around a much earlier ceremony.
If you know roughly when you want to marry but not where, this is worth working through with someone beforeyou commit. We’ve had couples come to us with only an idea — a small wedding, or just the two of them, sometime in a particular month — and we’ve picked the destination together. Some of those ended up in Fiji, some inthe Caribbean. They knew what they wanted the day to feel like; the map came afterwards. That’s one of ourfavourite parts of this work.
When you don’t get to choose the hour
Sometimes the ceremony time is not yours. Churches and town halls hand you a slot, and that slot is very oftenbetween 11:00 and 15:00 — the worst possible window in a European summer.
We photograph it anyway, and it’s fine. We’ve shot in hard sun, in rain, in snow. When the light is genuinely badthere are things you do: shoot wider, because wide frames hide the shadows under the eyes and nose that a close-up exposes. And wait. There is no ceremony where the couple stands perfectly still — sooner or later they turn,and the second their backs are to the sun the light on their faces becomes flattering. You take that second.
You don’t move a ceremony. You work it.
Resorts that run ten weddings a day
If you’re marrying at a resort, ask early whether your ceremony time is a slot.
At some resorts — this is very common in Central America and the Caribbean — there can be up to ten weddingsin a single day. Each couple gets a ceremony window, and nobody is allowed to run late, because the nextwedding is standing behind you. Then everyone moves off to their own reception venue.
It works, and it’s efficient. But it means the hour is decided for you, and it means there is no slack in your day atall. In Europe this is rare, and the intimacy is noticeably different.
Just know which one you’re buying.
The heat is not a detail
We photographed a wedding at 42°C in the shade. The bride fainted. At another wedding, in similar heat, thepriest fainted. Guests fainting is routine.
At that 42-degree wedding, almost everyone left their seats and stood in the shade. The rows behind the couplewere empty for the entire ceremony. We photographed a few frames exactly as it was — empty white chairs, thewhole party pressed against a wall of shade — because it’s the truth of that day and one day they’ll want toremember how brutal it was. But we didn’t shoot the whole ceremony that way. They had spent a year planningthis and had never imagined empty chairs behind them, so we moved, changed angles so the empty rows felloutside the frame, and worked closer.
We got through it and both we and the couple were happy with the pictures. We also spent the following days inhospital with severe sunstroke. That was a first, and we’d rather it stayed that way.
So the advice is blunt: if you’re marrying in July or August in southern Europe or the Caribbean, choosethe hour carefully and don’t sacrifice your own health or your guests’ for a symmetrical schedule. Talk toyour planner and your photographer before you fix the time. There is always a version of the day that works.
The 07:00 ceremony
Here’s an option almost nobody considers, and it’s excellent.
One couple in Costa Rica did their ceremony at 07:00 on the beach. Soft light, no heat, nobody sweating. Thenthe whole group spent the day exactly as they wanted — pool, sea, doing nothing. In the afternoon everyone gotready again, and just before sunset they sat down to dinner.
It was one of the most relaxed weddings we’ve photographed, and it solved the heat problem completely. If yourdate lands in the hottest weeks of the year, this is worth putting on the table.
What thirty minutes late actually costs you
People nod at “don’t run late” without knowing what they’re losing. Here is exactly what it looks like.
We photographed a wedding in Dubai, at the Burj Al Arab. The couple got ready in a beautiful hotel in the city.They wanted an Orthodox religious ceremony, and the only church available was in Sharjah. Getting there tookan hour. Getting back took two.
The plan was to meet on the beach at the Burj Al Arab about an hour before sunset, with the whole setup ready.Instead, the coach carrying the guests from Sharjah sat in traffic, and we started roughly thirty minutes aftersunset. By the time the ceremony began it was completely dark.
We had photographed the setup earlier, in light, so we know precisely what that beach looked like an hour before,and what it looked like when the ceremony actually happened. It is not the same wedding.
Nothing was anyone’s fault exactly — they didn’t have an experienced planner, and traffic is traffic. But that’s thepoint. The calculation isn’t just how long it takes to get from A to B. It’s the day of the week, whether there’s apublic holiday or an event in the city, and what happens if the coach is thirty minutes slower than the map says.Build in more margin than you think you need, because the ceremony is the most beautiful and most emotionalpart of the day, and it is the one thing you cannot repeat.
How to fix your ceremony hour before you book anything
- Look up the actual sunset time for your date and your exact location — not the country, the town. Between Athens and Seville there’s more than an hour of difference on the same day.
- Count back 60 to 90 minutes. That’s your ceremony start.
- Check what the venue or the church will actually allow, and find out whether your time is a slot with otherweddings behind it.
- Count the travel honestly, including the day of the week and anything happening in the city, and addmargin.
- If it’s July or August somewhere hot, either move the ceremony to the very edge of the day or considerdoing it in the morning and eating at sunset.
Ask these five questions before you sign a venue contract rather than after. Almost everything else about awedding day can be adjusted late. The position of the sun cannot.
