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Ulysses Photography Blog

Ocean Bride

By Jenni Ashton

When she originally booked us, Lauren told us she saw the photos on our website of a bride in the ocean in her wedding gown, and so she also wanted to get in the water in her own expensive wedding gown. We hit a snag, however, when the venue told Lauren that she couldn’t go down to the beach after her reception because there was another wedding immediately after hers. Lauren was disappointed that we wouldn’t be able to shoot those photos. But there was no way we were going to give up that easily—she had been planning this for a year! I sent her some photos of another bride in the ocean that we had taken just the week before and told her we would do whatever it took to get her those shots. We came up with a plan to sneak out of the reception 15 minutes early and head for the beach down the road. So we snuck out, got in the car, and then we all just started laughing. Lauren and Justin said, “We feel like we’re doing something illegal.” It was fun right from the start. We got to the beach and took some amazing photos.

As we were concluding our session, along came another bride and groom with their two photographers and videographer. As the other bride passed us she looked in total shock at Lauren and Justin (both soaked from the waist down) and said something like, “I’m not doing that.” It hit home for us why we were so thankful to have an incredible couple like Lauren and Justin with their adventurous spirits and willingness to do something completely different.

While walking back up the beach to leave, we passed a man with a WaveRunner and tubes. He asked Lauren and Justin if they wanted to do some tubing. They asked if we would mind, and we said, “Go!” They jumped back into the water and onto the tubes. He took them for quite a ride, and they obviously had a blast. Ulysses and I stood on the shore taking pictures the whole time. There was a huge crowd watching, and people kept saying things like, “We see brides here all the time, but we’ve never seen anything like this.” When Lauren and Justin got back to the beach, their faces were beaming, and so were ours.

We returned to the venue, but we couldn’t find any of the parents' cars in the parking lot. Justin went back into the venue to see if any of his wedding party was still there. He walked inside, barefoot, still soaking wet in his undershirt and tuxedo pants. The three of us in the car could not stop laughing, watching him walk into this high-end venue on the North Shore of Long Island, with the other wedding (the couple we’d seen earlier on the beach) already in progress. He came back out pretty quickly, as there was no one there he knew. Apparently, they had been unintentionally stranded. So we drove a bit down the windy driveway and parked near a field of grass. They called their family to pick them up, but it was going to take about a half-hour for them to come back.

Well, here we had a wet bride and groom and a patch of grass. What could we do? We weren’t going to leave them alone, so we figured we might as well take some more pictures. Ulysses got out of the car with a huge smile on his face.

We told them to get down in the grass, and Lauren jokingly said, “But I might get my dress dirty.”

We got some more great pictures, and finally the family showed up. As Ulysses and I drove off, we were literally shouting out the window. It was a perfect day.

Ulysses and Jenni Ashton are a husband-and-wife team of wedding photographers based in New York. While Ulysses has enjoyed shooting for many years, they have been working together full-time for three years. They find wedding photography to be an amazing outlet for their passion, creativity and energy. View their combined perspective on wedding photography at www.ulyssesphotography.com.