Smrithan and Sahana had been working in the US for a long time when they decided where to get married. They could have done it anywhere. They chose Chennai, with their close family around them, on a beach an hour down the East Coast Road.

Theirs is a love marriage, and the proposal that started it was completely their own. By the time we got to Mahabalipuram, they had already been planning this for a while, and you could tell. Three days, a small circle of people, and nothing in it that felt borrowed from somebody else's wedding.

Here is how it went, and what we would tell any couple thinking about a beach wedding at Grande Bay Resort.

Why couples pick Grande Bay Resort, Mahabalipuram

Grande Bay Resort and Spa sits right on the East Coast Road in Mahabalipuram, looking out at the Bay of Bengal. It is far enough from Chennai to feel like a getaway and close enough that your family can drive down the morning of.

The property gives you two very different kinds of wedding in one place. There is the Samudra ballroom, which seats up to around five hundred, and there is Saagara, the resort's private beach area, which is where a beachfront ceremony happens. Lawns and outdoor spaces sit in between. For a wedding like this one, with a small guest list and functions across three days, having an indoor option and a beach option on the same property is the whole reason the venue works.

The other thing it has going for it is Mahabalipuram itself. Guests who have flown in from abroad are twenty minutes from the Shore Temple and Pancha Rathas, which means your wedding weekend has somewhere for everyone to go on the afternoon nobody has planned for.

If you are weighing up Mahabalipuram beach wedding venues, that is the practical test. Not how it photographs in the brochure, but whether the venue can hold a sangeet, a beach ceremony and a hundred restless relatives on the same patch of land.

Day one: the sangeet

The sangeet ran four to five hours and it was the loudest night of the three.

Family and friends performed, one group after another. Then games, which is usually where a sangeet either lifts or dies, and this one lifted. Then the floor opened and everybody went on it.

What stood out was how much feeling was in the room for a small gathering. When the guest list is close family and real friends rather than four hundred people, nobody is performing for strangers. Every person dancing actually knows the couple. That changes the pictures completely. You get reactions instead of poses.

A note for couples planning a sangeet at a beach resort. The sea breeze on ECR picks up in the evening and it is lovely to be in and difficult to light and mic. Worth raising with your decor and sound teams early, not on the day.

Day two: the beachside Tamil wedding

The wedding was the next morning, on the beach.

It opened with the couple's entry, then maalai maatral, the garland exchange, where the families lift the bride and groom and the garlands get swapped over everyone's heads. It is a ritual designed to be chaotic, and the harder each side tries to win it, the better it photographs.

Then the oonjal. The couple are seated on the swing while the women of both families circle them, sing, and feed them milk and banana, swinging them gently the whole time. Oonjal is the slowest, warmest part of a Tamil Hindu wedding. After the noise of maalai maatral, the room drops to singing and a swing moving, and the couple finally get a few minutes to just sit next to each other.

Then the ceremony itself, outdoors, with the Bay of Bengal behind it.

An outdoor beachside wedding at Grande Bay is a different thing to photograph than a hall. The light is open and bright, the horizon does the work no decor can, and there is nothing overhead flattening everything. Smrithan and Sahana were visibly, obviously in love through all of it, and when that is true you mostly stay out of the way and keep working.

Two honest things about beach ceremonies on this coast, since nobody tells couples this. June mornings on ECR get warm fast, so the earlier the muhurtham the better for everybody including your grandmother. And the sea is loud. The priest's chanting carries less than you expect. Plan your audio if the ceremony matters to people watching from abroad.

Day three: the reception at Mayor Ramanathan Centre

The reception moved back into the city, to the Mayor Ramanathan Centre at Amarjothi Nagar.

It was formal in shape and relaxed in feeling. The couple entered first, then the family entries, and after that it settled into the real business of a reception, which is greeting several hundred people one at a time.

Receptions get written off as the boring one. They are not. The reception is the only function where the couple stand still and everyone comes to them, one by one, and says something. Most of our best candid frames from any wedding come from the ninety seconds after someone has finished hugging the bride and is walking away still laughing.

Day four: the post-wedding couple shoot at Marina Beach

The last day was theirs.

Smrithan and Sahana have history in Chennai. The beach, the shops along it, the places they went when they were first getting to know each other. So they asked for their couple shoot at Marina Beach, in the places that actually meant something, and they asked us to shoot it on the fly.

We did almost no posing. They shot balloons at the stalls, played the games, ate bajji standing up because they genuinely love South Indian food and were not going to walk past it. The whole thing ran about ninety minutes.

It ended the way they wanted it to end, with the two of them in a yellow Chennai auto.

This is the kind of post-wedding shoot we wish more couples asked for. Not a styled set of poses at a pretty location, but an hour and a half somewhere that already belongs to them, doing what they would be doing anyway. The pictures look like them because they were actually them.