Wedding Photography, Elopements, and Covid

Cat is the woman behind the multiple-award-winning wedding photography brand, Wild Connections Photography, and the Adventure Wedding Academy, an education platform for wedding professionals looking to niche their business and elevate their brand, offering workshops, mentoring, and online learning resources.

A British expat, Cat has built a life and business in the Austrian Alps, where she’s an industry leader in adventurous weddings and elopements.

She works with couples from all over the world to capture their unique wedding days across Europe, empowering couples to create a wedding day experience that’s unique to them.

She gets most of her inspiration from National Geographic, adventure photographers, and actions sports.

Elopements and Weddings

Cat delves us into the difference between an elopement and a wedding.

 The elopement is more about not following traditions and having an experience that is more about what they want to do and how they want to feel.

That includes the number of people invited, not having a religious ceremony, though it doesn’t have to be super adventurous, maybe just to a location that is meaningful for the couple, and the rest of the day doing things that they would want to remember. It’s all about the experience the couple has, and including those few people in that experience.

The wedding is following the traditions of having a ceremony, a dinner, cocktails, first dances and some speeches... It's a very different feeling to the day and what the day is about. It is less about the experience of the couple and more about the logistics of the wedding, and making sure everyone is happy…it’s almost less personal.

The Effect of Covid

However, due to Covid, Cat thinks that elopements are put in the spotlight more as they gain more importance. People are starting to call them “micro weddings” and “covid weddings”

Even in Covid, a lot of people want to get married, so they are investigating in new ways to do it; and elopement is part of that solution. Even after covid, Cat believes that it will become more main stream of having a big wedding, than having small more intimate ceremonies.

She thinks the wedding industry will evolve and change.

One thing she hopes never comes back is the pressure and expectations put on couples. She hopes that because of covid, couples would realize that they have the power to say no to the pressure put on them. She says that before covid, couples are pressured to have weddings with 200 people cause they have to invite people they haven’t even met, or are just acquaintances of a relative…

They were pushed into decisions they don’t want, so covid paved the way out of that, and maybe now more people will stand up and refuse that pressure and that in turn, will change how people perceive what a wedding is and should be. So the couples will have the freedom of doing the wedding the way they want it to be, unaffected by their family, friends, society, and the industry’s expectations and pressures.  It also gives them a lot of financial freedom.

Some Advice for The Couples

“Nobody should get into debt for their wedding.That’s wrong.”

Some couples have a hard time to find the right photographer to shoot their wedding. So Cat gives us some tips for the average person to convey what they’re looking for in a photographer, or simply in the whole process. So listen up you couples out there:

From her perspective, clients should never need to instruct the photographer, unlike in a commercial sense since you know your product best and how you want it to be portrayed.

For weddings, if you’re hiring a photographer, you shouldn’t even hire someone if you didn’t look at their work and loved it, and imagined yourself being in one of their pictures.

“If you don’t already connect with their style of work, with their editing style, with the way they work, the way they pose their couples… especially with wedding photography, where it’s mostly candid… it needs to be a very natural decision and you need to have complete trust in them.”

If there’s chemistry between you and the photographer, they will be able to get magic from you as a couple, because they will know how to get you to relax in front of the camera, and you just need to trust that they will do an amazing job.

Also, photographers would be happy if you share with them your views prior to the shoot. You can send them pictures you liked, either taken by them or by other photographers, and communicate to them the reasons you liked that photo; is it because of the lighting, the colors, the angle, the pose, etc.

For good locations, Cat always recommends to hire a photographer who knows the area or is a local, or at least has been there a few times because it is better to have that local knowledge.

Also, you have to decide the mood of the photos, if you want mountains, water, forests…so find someone who specialize in those places.

Cat finds her beautiful locations on Instagram, Google Earth, hiking websites, trail maps recommendations…

“Do your research and find someone who know the area well and can actually advise you on tips for the best way to pull it off” she says.