If you have been searching for how to plan an elopement, you have probably found dozens of articles about permits, timelines, vendors, and locations. Those things absolutely matter, and I will help you work through all of them. But after years of planning elopements with my couples, I do not think any of them determine whether your wedding becomes one of the greatest days of your life.

Two decisions matter more.

The first is choosing one incredible experience and making it the heart of your elopement. The second is giving yourselves enough time to actually enjoy it.

Most people begin by searching for beautiful locations. They choose a ceremony spot, build a timeline around it, and only then begin thinking about what they will experience once they arrive. I like to start somewhere completely different:

What is something you have always dreamed of experiencing together?

Maybe it is riding horses across black sand beaches, taking a raft through a glacier lagoon, hiking to an alpine lake, watching whales off the Oregon Coast, flying into the mountains by helicopter, or ending the day around a campfire while coyotes howl somewhere in the distance.

Once we know what makes both of you light up, we can find the landscape where it belongs. The location becomes more than a backdrop. It becomes part of a story you will spend the rest of your lives telling.

The other piece is time. Not more time so we can cram in another overlook, hike, or portrait location, but enough time to move through the day without constantly looking at the clock.

Some of the best moments I have photographed were never written into a timeline. They were the bakery we wandered into because everyone was hungry, where a local insisted that we try the red velvet cake. They were the whales that surfaced beside the boat, the horses that raced across a field to greet us, and the driftwood log a couple sat on for twenty minutes longer because neither of them wanted to leave yet.

Those moments happen when there is room for them.

When you can move at the pace the day naturally wants to unfold, your wedding stops feeling like a schedule and begins to feel like an actual experience. Years later, the photographs become the artifacts that take you back to it.

Begin with the experience

If I could recommend only one thing to every couple I work with, it would be this: choose one experience you have always dreamed about and let it become the cornerstone of your wedding.

It should not be something we squeeze between your ceremony and dinner because there happens to be an opening in the timeline. It should be part of the reason you chose to get married there in the first place.

Maybe that means taking a raft through a glacier lagoon before sharing lunch somewhere secluded. Maybe it is riding Icelandic horses across a black sand beach, kayaking through crystal-clear water, whitewater rafting with your favorite people, watching whales from a boat, or flying into the mountains with a qualified helicopter operator.

Whatever you choose, we build around it.

I know it may sound strange coming from a photographer, but I do not plan elopements around photographs. I plan them around experiences.

We can choose a beautiful overlook, watch the forecast, and think carefully about what you want to wear. What we cannot do is write genuine awe into a timeline. I cannot schedule the moment you laugh so hard you cannot catch your breath or manufacture the feeling of seeing a whale surface beside your boat. I cannot create the expression on your face when you step onto a glacier for the first time.

You have to live those moments before I can photograph them.

That is why I spend so much of the planning process asking questions that may not seem like wedding questions at all. What has been sitting on your bucket list for years? What does an incredible day together actually look like? When do you feel most like yourselves?

Would you rather spend the afternoon riding horses through coastal meadows, hiking to a secluded lake, paddling across glassy water, or building a campfire outside a cozy cabin with your favorite record playing in the background?

Once I understand what you are chasing, I can start figuring out where in the world that experience can happen.

Instead of asking, Where should we elope? we get to ask, Where can we do the thing we cannot stop thinking about?

That is a much more interesting place to begin. It also leads us toward a wedding that feels like it could only belong to the two of you. When you are fully inside an experience you cannot believe you finally get to have together, the photographs follow naturally.

Give yourselves time to live it

The next decision has nothing to do with where you go. It is about how much time you give yourselves once you get there.

Every elopement timeline I create is built around the experience rather than how many locations we can squeeze into a day. I am not interested in racing you from one beautiful place to another until everything begins to blur together.

If you cannot decide between horseback riding, kayaking, hiking, whale watching, and camping beneath the stars, that may be a sign that your elopement needs more than one day. It could be two days. It could be three. One of the greatest things about eloping is that you have the freedom to decide what your wedding gets to be.

You do not need to leave a spectacular sunset because one hundred people are waiting for dinner to begin. You can stop for lunch before everyone becomes hungry and miserable. You can spend the morning drinking coffee while the sun comes up over the mountains. You can sit on a beach until you are ready to leave or take a detour because a dirt road looks interesting.

Breathing room is what allows you to notice the little pieces of the day. It is also what gives us space to adapt when the weather changes, an activity runs longer than expected, or something far better than the original plan appears in front of us.

Some of my favorite memories have come from those unplanned moments.

In Iceland, a group of horses raced across a field to greet us after our final hike of the day. A sunset champagne pop suddenly became one of those wonderfully strange, unmistakably Icelandic experiences none of us could have planned.

Another time, wolves began howling while my couple sat beside a campfire. The conversation stopped and every one of us sat completely still, listening to this ethereal sound in the distance.

There was the herd of elk that casually crossed the road in front of us and the hidden beach we found because we were not in a hurry to get somewhere else. There was also the flood that forced us to postpone an elopement for twenty-four hours. What initially felt like awful luck gave us waterfalls that were twice as powerful the following morning. We stood there soaked by the mist, barely able to hear each other over the water, and it became one of the greatest parts of their wedding.

Then there was that tiny bakery. Everyone was hungry, so we stopped without thinking much of it. A local insisted we try the red velvet cake, and to this day I think all of us would happily fly across the country for another slice.

I will never forget the Icelandic sheep that wandered onto a trail either. Everyone froze. I quietly switched my camera into silent mode and moved at the speed of a sloth so I could photograph them without disturbing the whole encounter.

We could never have scheduled any of those moments. What we could do was leave enough room in the day for them to happen.

That is why I do not see planning and photography as two separate parts of my work. By the time I lift my camera for the first photograph, some of the most important images have already been made possible by the way we planned the day.

How I help turn the big idea into a real elopement

People often assume my job begins when I pick up my camera, but honestly, that is one of the last things I do. My work begins months earlier, and sometimes more than a year before your elopement, by getting to know the two of you.

I want to know what makes you feel alive, what has been sitting on your bucket list, and how you naturally spend time together. I want to know whether your perfect morning begins with a five-mile hike or coffee under a pile of blankets. Most of all, I want to know what could make you look at each other at the end of your wedding and say, I cannot believe we actually got to do that.

Once we know the experience, I begin researching where it can happen and what it will take to do it well.

If your dream is racing horses across a black sand beach, I want to find the right place and an experienced operator who treats the animals well. If you want to kayak clear water, land near a glacier, hike to an alpine lake, or get married inside a national park, I look at the season, access, local regulations, permits, qualified guides, and current conditions before we build the rest of the plan around it.

Then we begin layering in the rest of your day.

Would your vows feel right at the heart of the main adventure, or would you rather exchange them somewhere quiet beforehand? Do you want an hour to wander through a coastal town afterward? Should we end the night around a campfire? Would coffee on the porch of your cabin make the morning feel more like the two of you?

Every decision supports the experience instead of competing with it. While you are dreaming about the fun pieces, I am thinking about everything happening behind them: weather patterns, permits, seasonal access, drive times, trail conditions, backup plans, boat departures, sunrise, sunset, where you will eat, and whether the day still works if the weather goes completely sideways.

My gold standard for care is that you get to enjoy your wedding without managing it.

You should not need to keep track of when we have to leave for the boat. I will know. You should not spend your ceremony thinking about parking, changing weather, or whether we are running behind. Those are the details I am already watching.

When I have done my job well, you can stop managing your wedding and start living it. You can be completely present with each other, and I can photograph what that actually feels like.

Forty years from now

When I picture my couples forty or fifty years from now, I do not imagine them opening their wedding album and only saying, These photographs turned out beautifully.

I imagine them interrupting each other with stories.

Remember the horse that kept trying to eat your flowers?

Remember jumping into Crater Lake and how the cold completely shocked us?

Remember that tiny bakery with the red velvet cake?

Remember sitting around the campfire when the wolves started howling?

Remember when we thought the weather had ruined everything, and then we saw those waterfalls the next morning?

Those are the stories I want you to carry home. Not because they make for great photographs, but because they become part of your life together.

The photographs make sure you never lose the way it all felt.

That is why I care so deeply about everything that happens before your wedding day. Every decision we make shapes what becomes possible once you are standing there. It shapes the experiences you share, the conversations you have, the moments that catch you completely by surprise, and the stories you will still be telling years from now.

We are not creating a collection of beautiful photographs from a place you barely had time to notice. We are creating a wedding you will never forget, then preserving the pieces you will want to return to for the rest of your lives.

If you are beginning to plan and there is an experience you cannot stop thinking about, tell me what it is. We will start there.