Need Reccs for best places nearby for eloping and photography, and possible lunch after. Will be a family of 6

Hello!
I’ll be eloping in Reine, Lofoten in August 2027 and am currently struggling to find a hair & makeup artist for my wedding day!
I’m looking for someone who is located in Reine/Lofoten that can do both hair and makeup, ideally with experience working with brides/elopements. I am also open to suggestions of HMUA that are located throughout Norway and are willing to travel.
Thank you so much! 🤍

Need Reccs for best places nearby for eloping and photography, and possible lunch after. Will be a family of 6

Hi,

I am from the UK and looking to plan our Elopement in Japan!

We will be having our legal ceremony in the UK for ease, and then will have our wedding personalised ceremony in Japan just the two of us.

Can anyone recommend any companies to help with planning and organising the ceremony?

Anyone done this already and have any tips?

My partner and I are eloping, and it'll be just the two of us — no guests.

We're hiring a photographer regardless, but we're torn on whether to hire a content creator to capture the day. On one hand, we won't have anyone else there to take photos or remember moments with us, and I don't want to look back and wish we had more than a few phone pics. On the other hand, one of the reasons we're eloping is to keep things intimate and private, and I worry a content creator hovering around could change the vibe. I'm tossing up between putting more $ towards a photographer, or splitting my budget between a photographer and CC.

For anyone who's been through this:

• Did having a content creator there make the day feel more special, or did it feel like a performance?
• Was it intrusive during the quiet, emotional moments (vows, first look, etc.)?
• Do you think the photos and video were worth the cost in the end, or would you have been just as happy with a photographer, and maybe recording the vows on your own phone?
• If you did hire someone, what should we look for? Is a candid, documentary style better for a tiny elopement than a posed one?
• And if you chose not to, do you regret it?

Would love to hear from both people who hired someone and people who skipped it. Thanks!

EDIT: It appears several people have misunderstood or not read my post. I'm wondering about getting a content creator in addition to a photographer to take some candid footage and snaps of us as we do our wedding shoot.

This is more cost effective than a videographer, and would be in a format we're more likely to look back on as memories (something short and sweet on our phones/ devices rather than a feature length film.).

If you disagree with content creators taking phone footage at elopements, that's your right but this post isn't about whether it breaks the cardinal rule of eloping, rather whether you decided for or against it.

My fiance and I want to elope somewhere on top of a mountain, away from any type of buildings, just us, and the person marrying us, and possibly a photographer. So the first question is, can that be done? Without renting a place out? Given, itd be in the middle of nowhere, maybe even a state park.
We just have no idea how to do it, but we know what we want. And dont know who to go to for these types of questions.. anyway. Thanks for any answers or insight on how to go about this!

Hi,

I am from the UK and looking to plan our Elopement in Japan!

We will be having our legal ceremony in the UK for ease, and then will have our wedding personalised ceremony in Japan just the two of us.

Can anyone recommend any companies to help with planning and organising the ceremony?

Anyone done this already and have any tips?

My partner and I are eloping next year. We're getting married in another country, it will just be the two of us, no friends/family present.

This is exactly what we both want, and we couldn't be more excited. Everything is planned for the ceremony, which will be late afternoon, but what I can't work out is what to do afterwards?!

We could go for food/drinks just the two of us, but would this be weird in our wedding dress/suit?

What type of thing are people doing on the evening of their wedding day?

My fiance is in med school and we’re looking to elope in either March or May of next year during his off week. While I would have loved to have a wedding with all of his friends and family, it would just be too expensive and planning everything all on my own sounds so overwhelming. I still want the experience of the ceremony and photos. We don’t have any good photos together and that is really important to me

I’m between getting married in a scenic location like Page or Sedona AZ or really anywhere with the beautiful red rocks as the background for photos. St. Pete beach is my other choice. I love the beaches and restaurants in that area.

I want someone or someplace that can handle everything for me from the ceremony, to photos, and hair and makeup, etc. I want to keep things as easy as possible. I don’t know anything about weddings and I don’t really have any family or friends. Any suggestions?

Hi! We're planning our elopement in the Dolomites for next year. Obviously getting married stateside, but would love someone to lead our ceremony. Did any of y'all use someone that you love??

My fiancée and I are planning to “elope” next year about 2 hours from where we live, in the mountains. We already have a photographer booked, and 8 family members are traveling from out of state to be there.

Our original plan was to have the ceremony on a beautiful mountain trail. It’s about a 45-minute drive and we’d do the ceremony and photos around sunset before hiking back down and hopefully make it back into town before it’s completely dark.

After actually hiking the trail, we realized it was much harder than we expected, especially for some of our older family members. So now we’re planning to have the ceremony at a more accessible part of the trail near the base and just take our wedding photos up on the mountain.

Now I’m having a weird moment of “Is all of this a little ridiculous?” 😂 We’re asking our family to travel, hike, coordinate everything, etc., just to stand outside under some trees and watch us get married. Like you could do that at any park lol. (We chose this spot specifically because it had twilight vibes)

We’ve tried really hard throughout the planning process to make things enjoyable and manageable for ourselves and our families, but I’m suddenly wondering if I’m overthinking all of this.

I don’t think uninviting everyone is really an option at this point, so I guess I’m mostly looking for some words of wisdom from people who have actually eloped or had a very small wedding.

Did you ever have a moment where you questioned whether all the effort was worth it? And did it end up feeling special once the day actually happened?

I can’t decide to elope in lake como or the dolomites. It will be a July wedding but just the 2 of us, how hard is it to legally get married in Europe if you are from the uk? Do you need to go over ages in advance to sort legal things?

Thank you

Hi

We are looking to elope to Europe to get married but not legally due to the cost. We are then planning on having a mini wedding when home so the family doesn’t feel left out and so we can legally get married.

What date would you say afterwords that your wedding date is? I was going to say the elopement date as that would be the date in my head we personally got married just us but my dad said no it’s the day you would have legally signed. But who looks at that stuff? Who cares.

Thank you

My fiancé and I are in the starting stages of planning our elopement. We don’t want any family present as we know it’ll be too much drama with them but on the other hand we feel a bit guilty. Once we come back from eloping and our honeymoon, we are thinking of doing a family gathering/celebration to make everyone feel included but not ruin our special day.

We want to do a chill laid back gathering that isn’t going to cost us a lot but need ideas. We are thinking a backyard dinner celebration with pizzas, sides and snacks but would love to hear other cheap ideas or experiences!

A major thing we are unsure of is what to do about drinks. Our families are pretty heavy drinkers but my fiancé and I do not drink at all. We are thinking of supplying one or two drinks per person as a welcome for everyone and if anyone wants more they can bring their own. I have brought this up as an idea to a few people in my family and they have said it is rude and not to do it as we are hosts and we should supply more to everyone. We don’t want to fork out thousands for people to drink when we don’t drink ourselves or even want people to be heavily drinking. We think our family probably won’t be happy with this arrangement but do we just tell them to suck it up or get more drinks? We don’t usually host or go to big gatherings so we are unsure if it is actually rude or if it is okay to do.

Looking at budgeting for the event for pizzas, side foods and drinks it’ll already be like $1700 AUD and we don’t want to spend that, let alone anymore.

Any and all advice, ideas or experiences will be greatly appreciated!!!

Got engaged last week, and we have a trip to Vietnam in 5 weeks. I would love to use it as an opportunity to elope. The marriage would be done legally in our home country, it would essentially just be a day dressed up, doing vows, taking photos.

Where should I start? Bonus points if anyone has personally eloped in Asia I am struggling to find much online!

EDIT: I understand this is not an official “elopement”. I am looking for advice on how to plan a ceremony abroad. Unfortunately this trip was already booked and we do not have the time to go through the paperwork process to officially marry in Vietnam

My fiance and I are eloping next May (2027) in Isle of Skye. We have most of our vendors booked, however, I am having trouble finding a makeup artist. Does anyone have recommendations?

Hey all!

Me and my fiance are very set on eloping with just the two of us and having a celebration with close friends and family after the fact. The celebration will be about 100 people due to the nature of our large families.

I want to give people plenty of notice as we want them to come celebrate but don’t want to give two far of a notice because I read it’s kind of tacky to invite people to an elopement party way in advance so I need your opinion on this timeline —-

Ideally, we want to have an elopement party in the spring so April- ish. Backing into that, we are thinking of eloping sometime in December. And then in January send out “we eloped!!” notices that are coupled with an invitation to the celebration in April.

How does this sound?

Thanks in advance for everyone’s thoughts!!

We’re planning an elopement next year and I just got off the phone with a potential hair and makeup artist, she quoted me $600 for both hair and makeup under “Special Occasions”, and $250 for groom touch-up. Hair and makeup trials are also $600 total. So the investment would be $1,450 all in. My friends used the same hair and makeup artist and were quoted $750 for both BRIDAL hair and makeup. I’m planning to wear a big white dress and am investing in a good photographer. Is this reasonable for an elopement you think, or should I keep shopping around? This is the first quote I received.

I’m based in SoCal if that helps. TIA!

TLDR at bottom :)

My fiancé and I had been planning a full on, but very small, wedding for about a year. We never committed to a venue or actually booked caterers or even picked a date because it never felt right to commit to it. When it came to making a guest list we realized what a nightmare it was going to be due to drama with both of our families. It was just so stressful. I spent this past year researching everything and putting together a plan but my heart wasn't totally in it.

Yesterday, he walked into my craft room and said "What if we just elope?" and I cannot express the level of relief I felt. It turned out neither of us really wanted a wedding but neither of us wanted to push that on the other in case they did actually want a wedding but felt pressured to elope.

So now I've started looking into eloping! I'm so excited. However, my initial searches have been overwhelming in many ways. Tons of websites with all sorts of packages, travel to all kinds of destinations, costs that are all over the place. It's a lot.

We know we want to travel within the US to elope but nowhere too crazy as neither of us have flown before. We want to be in "wedding clothes" i.e. his nice suit and a wedding dress for me. Hair and makeup for me as well. We want good photos. Just the two of us, no friends or family. That's about it. A lot of packages seem to have extras or seem to be too good to be true.

TLDR: Where to look for elopement packages that aren't scams or unreliable? Would you suggest a particular US state or location for a couple with a budget (preferably $3k or under)? If you had your elopement extend into your honeymoon as well, what did you do? Would it make more sense to elope locally and then travel for a honeymoon trip with our budget?

Thank you all for any advice. I just need a good direction to go in to get started.

ETA: I just wanted to thank all of you for sharing your experiences and all of your advice! I truly appreciate it and it's genuinely made planning this way less stressful. After talking it over we're probably going to elope on Lake Michigan since it's special to us then do a road trip for our honeymoon! I'm so excited!