Eloping With Your Dog: How to Include Pets in Your Ceremony Photos

Dogs at elopements work better than dogs at weddings, and the reason is simple: elopements have fewer moving parts. There is no one to accidentally let the dog through the wrong door, no ring bearer duty to fumble, no 200 guests whose attention divides between the couple and the animal. At an elopement, a dog can be present for the whole morning, the ceremony, and the portraits. The dog becomes a participant rather than a prop. And the photographs that come from sessions where the dog is genuinely part of the day are consistently the ones couples tell me they look at most often.

Why Dogs at Elopements Work

I have photographed couples with their dogs at elopements in mountain parks, on coastal beaches, in city gardens, and in forest clearings, and the common thread in every session is that the dog’s presence changes how the couple holds themselves. They relax. They laugh. They look at each other in a way that is different from how couples look at each other when they are trying to be serious and ceremonial. The dog does not care about the ceremony. It cares about the couple. And that attention, directed at the people rather than the occasion, produces candid portraits that formal ceremony photographs cannot replicate. A couple kneeling to greet their dog mid-ceremony, looking at each other over the dog’s head while it tries to climb into the lap of someone wearing a wedding dress, is a photograph that tells a more complete story than almost anything I could stage deliberately.

How I Position Your Dog in the Ceremony

My approach is to treat the dog as a compositional element I cannot fully control and plan around that rather than against it. Before the ceremony begins, I do a ten-minute session with just the dog and one of the couple to understand how the dog responds to a camera, how it moves, and whether it is likely to sit still or not. Most dogs are not still. I accept this and use motion to my advantage: a dog leaping up, turning around, or walking between its people’s legs creates movement and energy in the frame that a static portrait cannot produce. I also look for the moments where the dog, by chance or by instinct, positions itself naturally within the couple’s embrace or pauses to look at the camera. These moments exist in every session. My job is to be ready when they happen.

The Logistics: Handler, Timing, and Location

Every elopement with a dog needs a designated handler who is not one of the two people getting married. This is the most important logistical element and the one couples most often overlook. The handler’s job is to hold the dog during the moments when the couple needs both hands free, to keep the dog from charging the camera between shots, and to be the person who takes the dog away if the dog needs a break before the session is over. A trusted friend, a family member, or a professional dog sitter can fill this role. Without a handler, the ceremony photographs consistently suffer because at least one person has a hand occupied by a leash at the critical moment.

Location matters more for dog-inclusive sessions than for any other elopement type. Parks and beaches with off-leash areas allow the dog to move freely and produce more natural behaviour. Locations with vehicle traffic, crowds, or noise that triggers anxiety in the dog make the session harder for everyone. I recommend scouting the location with the dog before the elopement date if the dog has not been there before, so that the day itself is not the first time the dog encounters that environment.

When the Dog Does Not Cooperate (And Why That’s Fine)

I have photographed elopements where the dog slept through the entire ceremony. I have photographed elopements where the dog refused to be anywhere except directly between the couple’s feet. I have photographed an elopement where the dog ate the bouquet in the five minutes between the ceremony and portraits. All of these sessions produced extraordinary photographs. The cooperation of a dog is not the prerequisite for a successful dog-inclusive elopement. What is required is a couple who is genuinely delighted by their animal regardless of what it does, and a photographer who can find the image in whatever the animal gives them. The sessions that go exactly as planned are often the least interesting. The sessions where the dog has its own agenda are the ones people talk about for years.

Where Dog-Inclusive Elopements Work Best

Destination elopements with dogs require planning around airline and accommodation policies. Most national parks in Canada allow dogs on trails on leash, which makes Banff, Jasper, and the Rockies accessible for dog-inclusive mountain elopements. Beaches in British Columbia, Ontario, and the Atlantic provinces vary in dog policy seasonally. For international destinations, the logistics of bringing a dog across borders are significant and worth researching thoroughly before committing to a destination. Within North America, the accessible dog-friendly elopement destinations I photograph most frequently are the BC coast, the Ontario wine country, and the mountain parks in Alberta, all of which allow dogs in most outdoor spaces and provide the kind of natural backdrop that works equally well whether the dog is cooperative or conducting its own independent agenda for the day.