Cornwall · The South West · 2026 & 2027
Elopement Wedding Photographer
Just the two of you, or the twelve people who matter most. 987 weddings behind me, one package, and nobody watching a clock.
I don’t sell a smaller package for a smaller wedding
Most photographers offer an elopement package. Three hours, a hundred images, a lower price. It looks like kindness and it is really a stopwatch — and a stopwatch is the one thing you were trying to get away from when you decided not to have a big wedding.
So there isn’t a cut-down version here. As an elopement wedding photographer I bring exactly what I bring to a hundred-and-fifty-guest Saturday: the whole day, unlimited hours, the same editing, the same delivery. If your ceremony is eleven minutes long and then you walk on a beach until the light goes, that is the day, and I will photograph all of it.
The reason is simple. Small weddings do not run to a schedule. They wander. Somebody suggests a pub. The tide comes in. The good hour turns out to be the one nobody planned, at seven in the evening, when the pair of you finally stop being looked at. You cannot book that in advance and you certainly cannot fit it into a three-hour window.
What an elopement wedding photographer should actually do
Very little, visibly. You have chosen a day with almost nobody in it, and the fastest way to ruin that is a photographer treating two people like a shoot.
I don’t pose you, I don’t bring a shot list, and I don’t fill the quiet with direction. For most of the day I am some distance away with a long lens, photographing you talking to each other. When we do walk somewhere for portraits it is fifteen minutes at a time, and the instruction is usually just “don’t look at me”.
The one thing I will do is watch the light and the tide, and tell you an hour beforehand that we should be somewhere in particular at a particular time. That is the extent of my planning, and on a small day it is worth more than everything else put together.
Where I photograph elopements
I live in Newquay and I was born in Cornwall, so the South West is home ground — I know where the light lands and when the tide turns. I also travel regularly to the Cotswolds and Hampshire, which between them cover most of the quiet, good-looking places people choose for a small wedding in England.
Home. Clifftops, coves, the north coast at sunset, and a beach you walk 133 steps down to. Anywhere from Bude to Land’s End.
Lusty Glaze →Dartmoor for weather and distance, the South Hams for estuaries and light. An hour and a half from my door.
The Mendips, the Levels, and a lot of very old stone. Good for couples who want countryside rather than coast.
The Jurassic Coast does the work for you. Durdle Door and Lulworth are photographed to death for a reason.
Honey-coloured villages, small churches, and the kind of pub lunch that turns into the best part of the day.
See also Boconnoc →The New Forest, and the coast around Lymington. Easy from London if your guests are coming down for the afternoon.
What an elopement costs, and what is in it
The same list every couple gets. There is no elopement tier, because there is no elopement discount and no elopement limit.
Cornwall is £2,000 because I am building a new Cornish portfolio and would rather tell you the reason than dress it up. Everything in the list above is the same either way. The full breakdown is here.
Straight answers
Yes, and I know how that reads. You are not paying for hours — nobody is counting them — you are paying for someone who has done this 987 times and edits every frame himself. That cost does not fall because there are fewer people in the room. What you get instead is a photographer with nothing else to cover, which on a small day is the entire point.
It doesn’t matter to me and I don’t price by headcount. Two people or forty, it is the same day and the same fee. Most of the small weddings I photograph have somewhere between six and thirty people.
You still need to give notice at a register office, usually at least 29 days beforehand, and be married somewhere licensed — or have a celebrant-led ceremony wherever you like and do the legal part separately. GOV.UK sets out the rules, and most couples I work with do the paperwork quietly one morning and keep the day itself for the part that matters.
If you want me to, yes. I know the coast well enough to plan a day around the tide and the light rather than the other way round. If you already have it worked out, I’ll just turn up and stay out of it.
Not remotely, and it is a good half of the small weddings I photograph. Usually it means the two of you know exactly what you want and exactly what you don’t, which makes my job easier and the pictures better.
Then we get better photographs. Rain on the coast is dramatic, and I work in whatever light is going — silent shutter all day, no flash until the dancefloor. The only thing I’d ask is that you bring a coat you don’t mind being seen in.
Send me the date and roughly where. I’ll tell you straight away whether I’m free, and £500 holds it.
Tell me the date and roughly where.
One package, no time limit, and a whole day photographed without either of you being asked to pose. If you are looking for an elopement wedding photographer in Cornwall or anywhere across the South West, I’ll tell you straight away whether I’m free.