This past week I was shooting a destination wedding at the Barcelo Maya Beach Resort near Playa del Carmen, Mexico.  It was a great week with an amazing bride and groom and wedding party that made me feel like family, plus of course a little vacation for myself and my wife.

The final day there I woke up early and took my camera out to take some photos of the sunset.  I found that I wasn’t sleeping in super-late (I’m not some young party crazy guy), but by 8 or 9 the sun is up and blazing hot already, and I had yet to see the sun rise.   So I walked down to the beach, put my phone down and spent the next hour taking photos, panoramas, HDRs, and all angles and framings that I could.

The morning was already light, but the sun wasn’t up.  As it rose up the sky got lighter and eventually a red ball was visible on the horizon.  It rose above, and just when it was fully visible it went back behind the wall of smog and pollution that had been hovering along the horizon from the start of the week, not bad, but enough that we didn’t seem to get those “all the gods painting the sky with unicorn tipped paintbrushes of angels” type of sunsets or sunrises (not that they were anything but wonderful of course.

When the sun rose high enough it hit the big puffy clouds that were hanging around, giving them some wonderful light.  After that it started to feel like a normal day and I headed back to the room to drop my camera off before going back out for another quick dip in the ocean before I headed home.

So now I’m back, catching up with email, and getting back on track.  Head over to Bailward Wedding Photography to see more details of the wedding or you can view a quick preview of the wedding currently posted on Facebook in this album.

What I did with my phone you might like to see.  I pointed it over the beach, set it on time lapse mode and ignored it for the hour I was shooting.  The resulting time lapse is, in my opinion, pretty nice and a decent representation of what it’s like to be there.  Please enjoy it below!