Car & Mel

Hola! We are Juan Carlos & Melissa. We always work together as a team and we also live our daily lives as a team since we recently got married.

We live in beautiful Puerto Vallarta, and all our weddings are destination weddings from people who come from abroad for their wedding celebration. We also sometimes travel to other cities or resorts in Mexico to cover, yes, more destination weddings! We very much enjoy serving couples from abroad who chose our country for their very special day.

Our style is documentary. We like to let things flow within the relaxed environment that fortunately our couples have being away from home. We let them enjoy their vacation and just plan on having a great time with their loved ones and friends.

We never direct our couples while shooting as we aim to tell the story of each wedding. Instead we do our best to capture every special moment always hoping for a great unexpected highlight.

We need our gear to be reliable and endure the extremely hot and humid weather we experience. Also, our gear has to have great low-light capabilities, as most of our weddings are on the beach or in the plain outdoors. Nikon is our brand of choice for these reasons.

We try to use the least gear possible so we can focus on the moments and not on carrying stuff around. We also very seldom change lenses. We don’t want to risk our gear to not-so-friendly elements such as the breeze (and salt) of the sea and the sand that surrounds us most of the time.

We always carry our two camera bodies each. For both of us the 35mm primes are standard on our D810‘s and Juan Carlos’ second body will have attached either an 85mm, a 135mm or an 80-200mm depending on his mood. Melissa will have the 50mm on the D500. Depending on the situation we may use the 24mm or 28mm mostly for the reception, more so if there will be fireworks going on.

Now, straight to our Lowepro Pro Runner 450 backpacks:

Bodies:

Nikon D810 x 2

Nikon D750

Nikon D500

Lenses:

Sigma Art 35mm f/1.4

Nikon Nikkor 35mm f/2 D

Nikon Nikkor 80-200mm f/2.8D

Nikon Nikkor 135mm f /2 D

Nikon Nikkor 85mm f/1.8G

Nikon Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G

Nikon Nikkor 28mm f/2.8D

Nikon Nikkor 24mm f/2.8D

Memory Cards: SanDisk Extreme PRO CF & SD Cards.

We never leave home without our Magmods: MagSpheres and MagGrids to use with our Yongnuo flash system (YN560-IV and YN560-TX) and we feel extremely comfortable with our Think Tank Photo Camera Straps V2.0.

www.carandmel.com