Kate and Adam fled a brutally cold Canadian winter (even by Canadian standards!), left Toronto, and headed to their Carmel elopement, where they had planned a very intimate ceremony on the beach. Plans don’t always work out exactly as expected, however, and it’s how you roll with these changes that will determine how your new day is going to go. Kate and Adam have the right attitude and I liked them straight-away! The town of Big Sur, suffering from an exceptionally dry California winter, had fallen victim to a late-season forest fire just one week before Adam and Kate arrived. The treasured Pfeiffer Beach where the ceremony was to be held, had been closed. As lovely as Big Sur is, the whole stretch of California Coast is ridiculously beautiful; at times wild and rugged, barren and windswept, and serene with kelp-forested bays that serve as sanctuaries for marine life…in a nutshell: a great place to escape to for an intimate wedding. Over the past year, we’ve been fortunate to photograph quite a few intimate/elopement type wedding ceremonies and they’re quite nice in that you can quickly change the script for the day without much hassle – as was the case for Adam and Kate – and it worked out beautifully. Kate and Adam were married at a gorgeous clearing atop Carmel River State Beach, a location suggested by their officiant. The ceremony was sweet and compact and included a lot of kissing which was so cute. I’m constantly impressed with people’s abilities to relax in the presence of a Carmel wedding photographer, whom they’ve just met, who is – at times – invading their space and the intimacy of their special time. We are very conscious of our presence in these intimate settings and always try to adopt an approach that complements the atmosphere of the day. Kate, Adam, and their families immediately made me feel like one of the family and, although I was only a part of their lives for a mere 2 hours, it felt like we’d known each other all along.
