My personal experience as elopement photographer
I grew up in a big Italian family where every life event must to be celebrated together, and a wedding, being the absolute life event, was the biggest of them all: a couple being celebrated by an entire community.
But as beautiful as large-scale weddings can be, couples get quickly swallowed by all the social obligations and the traditional conventions they have to respect, and what is meant to be “your day” must fit into the norms of that same community.
At that time I didn’t know there was another way.
The first time I heard about elopements was when I started working as a wedding photographer in Copenhagen. I’m not gonna lie, at first I felt like it was weird to do such a thing: I wasn’t used to think that marriage is not necessarily about committing in front of family and friends and I genuinely thought that eloping was a solution for people who for some reason had issues getting married in their home country. Proper cultural bias.
It took me a while to understand that not everybody wants a big fat wedding and that some people believe that committing to each other is what truly matters. Don’t get me wrong, I love traditional weddings and as a wedding photographer I love to be part of such an important life event. But I also understand why people would choose an intimate wedding with minimal and spontaneous planning.
An elopement wedding strips away all the stress and the must-do things: no schedule to comply with, no conventions to respect, no established practices.
There are literally no rules and you can plan your wedding the way you like it, without hurting anybody’s feelings.
This means getting married in the middle of a forest, by a beach, on the top of a mountain, or just in a beautiful city like Copenhagen.
Not sure between elopement and traditional wedding? Just ask yourself what truly matters to you: have you always dreamed about celebrating your love with friends and family or you’d prefer to make it all about you and your loved one?
There are no right answers here, luckily every couple is different.
