A Rainy Day Wedding at Harbour House Oceanfront
Every couple planning an outdoor wedding in Florida asks me some version of the same question. Usually they ask it lightly, like they are embarrassed to bring it up.
What happens if it rains?
I can give you the reassuring answer, which is that it will probably be fine. Or I can show you a day where it actually rained, and walk you through exactly what we did about it. Let’s do that one.
The morning was spent looking at a radar app, not at the light
Elaine and Jesse were getting married on the oceanfront deck at Harbour House in Melbourne Beach. The forecast had been wobbling for days, and by the morning of the wedding it had stopped wobbling and committed. Rain was coming. The only real question was when, and for how long.
So that is what the morning was: me, my phone, and a radar app, refreshing every few minutes and doing arithmetic.
This is the unglamorous part of the job that nobody photographs. You are not thinking about golden hour. You are looking at a green (and sometimes red!) shapes moving across a map and working out how many dry minutes you have left and what you can get done inside them.
We moved the timeline up
Once it was clear the rain was coming before the ceremony rather than after it, we stopped treating the schedule as fixed.
We pulled the first look forward and did it outside while the ground was still dry. Then we went straight into couple portraits. No lingering, no running through the full list just the pictures that mattered most, in the order that mattered most, while we had the conditions to get them.
And then, almost exactly as we finished, it started to drizzle.
This is the whole argument for a first look, by the way, and it has nothing to do with whether you want to see each other before the aisle. A first look gives you a block of portrait time that can be moved. A day built entirely around photos after the ceremony has nowhere to go when the weather turns, because by then the weather has already happened.
Then we waited
The drizzle set in. The deck went dark and wet, the brick turned to a mirror, and the chairs sat out there getting soaked.
Nobody panicked, and I want to be specific about why. It was not optimism. It was that the radar showed a gap coming, and everyone involved — the venue, the couple, me — had agreed we would use it rather than give up early and move inside.
That is the decision most people get wrong. The instinct when it starts raining is to call it and relocate. But Florida rain moves fast, and if you move indoors at 3:40 you cannot un-move at 4:05.
The clearing came, and so did the towels
The gap arrived. And the Harbour House team came out with towels and dried every single chair, by hand, one at a time.
I have photographed well over a hundred weddings at Harbour House since 2018 and I still stopped to film it, because it is not a thing most venues do. Nobody asked them. There was no discussion about whether it was worth it. Four or five people simply walked out into the wet and started drying chairs so that a couple could get married outside.
The ceremony started about ten minutes late
That is the headline, and I want it to land properly. A day of rain, a soaked ceremony site, and the ceremony began roughly ten minutes behind schedule.
They got married under the driftwood arch with the Atlantic behind them and a sky that was far more interesting than a blue one would have been. Overcast is good light. It is soft, it is even, and it does not make anybody squint.
Then we did the family photos. All of them. Nothing was cut.
And then it absolutely poured
About twenty minutes after the recessional, the sky opened properly. Not drizzle this time — standing water on the deck, rain bouncing off the brick, the arch standing out there by itself.
Everybody was inside by then, dry, with a drink, at a party.
If you are worried about rain on your own wedding day
None of what happened here was luck. It was a timeline with margin in it, a first look we were willing to move, a venue team that treats getting you outside as their job, and somebody watching the radar all morning so the couple did not have to.
I have written all of that up properly — backup plans, what to ask a venue before you book, what goes in a rain kit, and why cloudy skies are kinder than a cloudless noon — in what happens if it rains on your Florida wedding day. If you have an outdoor wedding booked and the forecast is making you anxious, start there.
If you are planning an outdoor wedding on the Space Coast
I would love to hear about it. I am based in Melbourne Beach, I photograph all over Brevard County and beyond, and I have been doing this long enough to be calm when the radar turns green.
Vendor Dream Team
Venue Harbour House Oceanfront Venue
Florals Violets in Bloom
Dress Nicole Maree Bridal
Hair & makeup Glam Culture
Video Skylimitless
DJ DJ Jimmy Lajon
Catering Executive Catering
