Destination Weddings in France: A Photographer’s Perspective

For several years now, I have been photographing destination weddings, working with couples who choose to travel from abroad to marry in France, particularly in the Loire Valley, where I live.

In this article, I want to explore how that choice shapes the photographs.

Why choose a destination wedding?

A wedding that unfolds over several days

A destination wedding often means guests travelling a considerable distance from home, giving couples and their loved ones an opportunity to gather for several days.

As a wedding photographer, my role is to tell each wedding story in all its richness. A celebration spanning several days is like a book with extra chapters. It allows me to document moments that have no place in a single day’s coverage: the anticipation of the evening before, softened by the joy of an intimate welcome gathering, or the tired laughter of the morning after.

A smaller gathering

Many of the destination weddings I photograph seem to grow from a desire for a more intimate celebration, with a shorter guest list—sometimes a natural consequence of choosing to marry far from home.

A smaller gathering encourages a closeness that gives the celebration its own atmosphere. Each guest has a greater presence, both in the day itself and in the photographs. As a photographer, I feel I get to know people better when there are fewer of them, because I can spend more time with each person. The way the groom’s best man talks with his hands; the way the bride’s mother bites her lip to hold back tears.

To return to my comparison with a novel, a wedding with fewer guests has fewer characters to introduce, and more time to get to know each person who appears in its pages.

A different way to experience a wedding

For couples and guests alike, a destination wedding is an opportunity to step into unfamiliar surroundings: a different culture, new landscapes, another way of life. The couples I work with who travel to France for their wedding are often looking for precisely this—a few days away from everyday life, spent laughing, eating, dancing and celebrating with their favourite people.

The way a wedding feels finds its way into the photographs. A celebration unfolding over several days can leave room for a slower pace, for the pleasure of simply being somewhere together. The images grow from that particular state of mind: the feeling of finally settling into a place, with the demands of everyday life held at a distance.

The atmosphere of your wedding photographs

A destination wedding shapes the photographs through the experience itself, but also through the setting the couple chooses.

Marrying abroad can be an opportunity to choose a venue you have dreamed of, somewhere whose character will become part of your photographs. I am fortunate to live in a country with wonderfully varied landscapes. In the Loire Valley, where I work most often, the images take on something of the river’s wilder banks, the grandeur of its châteaux and the golden light of late summer beneath tall trees—as they did at the Domaine de l'Etablière, Vendée.

This is one reason I love photographing details and the quieter scenes around a celebration. They help tell the story of the day and convey the atmosphere surrounding it. At a destination wedding, they take on particular importance: they record a place the couple has deliberately chosen for its beauty, its character and the experience it offers them.

The colour of the sky, dust caught in the light of a bedroom in an old manor house during the preparations, a door knocker polished by decades of use and thousands of hands, a wading bird in a stream, wind moving through the fields… These details become all the more precious when they help preserve a place that is unfamiliar to the couple, but that they will want to remember because it held their wedding.

Things to consider when planning your destination wedding photography

How the setting shapes the images

Wedding photographs are shaped by many things: the photographer’s eye, the atmosphere of the celebration, and, of course, the setting chosen by the couple. Beyond the venue itself, there is everything that gives a country or region its character: the plants, the light, the sun’s path at that time of year, the food, the culture…

I do not make the same photographs in a Renaissance château as I do in a converted farmhouse. It is rather like a painter finding a different palette in each place: shades of blue, olive green and white among the limewashed walls and olive trees of Puglia; dramatic blacks, warm golds and deep greens in a Renaissance château beside the Loire.

The photographer’s perspective and the couple’s wishes guide the story, but the destination and venue bring colours of their own.

A different kind of preparation

When I work with couples travelling to France to marry, I adapt my approach to the practicalities of planning from abroad. That may mean more conversations beforehand—planning a wedding from a distance can understandably bring a few extra worries—as well as finding times that work across time zones and preparing everything together in English.

The guests, however, do not always speak English to me. One lovely older lady spoke to me exclusively in Tamil throughout an entire wedding—a language I do not speak at all!

Your relationship with your photographer

When a wedding takes place over several days, perhaps with a smaller group of guests, each person working alongside the couple contributes to the atmosphere of the celebration.

As a photographer, I am often one of the people working most closely with the couple, because my role is to document the day as they experience it. Even over a single day, that closeness calls for trust. I am there for deeply personal moments, for emotions laid bare and exchanges with the people they love.

At a destination wedding, that relationship may extend over several days. It matters that I can be a calm, kind ally: attentive to the time we have for photographs, and equally sensitive to the emotions a wedding can bring to the surface.

The guidance I offer also takes on greater importance at a destination wedding. Couples choosing to marry in the Loire Valley are often on partly unfamiliar ground. Having grown up and worked here, I bring a knowledge of its landscapes and particularities that I can share with them—and that naturally finds its way into my photographs.

A destination wedding in the Loire Valley? What a lovely idea.

I cannot pretend to be entirely objective when a couple tells me they are considering a wedding in the Loire Valley. There is something particular about the place where you grew up: a quiet familiarity.

I love living and working here, and I love accompanying couples drawn to somewhere different, to photographs filled with golden light and portraits shaped by dramatic shadows.

If that sounds like you, I would love to hear from you.

Manon