Backyard weddings, micro weddings, the small and quiet days on Florida's Historic Coast. Photographed the way they actually feel: unhurried, close, and full of the few people who mean everything.
There is something about a backyard wedding. No hall to rent, no timeline handed to you by a venue, no rushing a room full of guests out by ten. Just the yard you already love, the porch you grew up on, the live oaks and palms that have watched your whole life happen.
Amanda was walked down a grass aisle in her own family's yard, past the people who raised her, toward the person she was about to marry. Nothing about it was borrowed. When the setting is already home, the whole day slows down, and that ease is exactly what shows up in the photographs later.
A small wedding is not a smaller day. It is the same love, with the volume turned up on the people who matter and turned down on everything that does not.
Intimate weddings and micro weddings are having their moment, and it is easy to see why. When the guest list is short, vows are heard instead of shouted over, the hug line takes minutes instead of hours, and you actually get to be present at your own wedding.
Paola photographs these days quietly, staying close without getting in the way, so that years from now you remember how it felt: your grandmother's hand, the toast that made everyone cry, the last dance under string lights in the backyard.
Amanda & Jed · a backyard wedding
The land is already yours, so there is no hall to book and no schedule dictated to you. The day belongs to you from the first cup of coffee to the last sparkler.
A shorter guest list keeps the whole day close and unhurried. You spend it with the people you would call at two in the morning, not a room of acquaintances.
With no venue bill, the day's budget goes where you actually feel it: the food, the flowers, and the photographs you will still be holding forty years from now.
This was never a way to spend less. It was a way to spend on what you keep.
The morning of an intimate wedding has a softness all its own. Getting ready in a bedroom down the hall, the little details laid out in the grass, mom fastening the last earring.
Tell Paola about your day and the place you have in mind. If your date is open, she will be in touch personally.