Prince Edward County Elopement Photographer

I was shooting at Sandbanks Provincial Park on a Tuesday in September when I realized that Prince Edward County had replaced the Niagara Peninsula as my first recommendation for Ontario wine country elopements. The light on the limestone dunes in the late afternoon, the vineyards turning through harvest season, and the quietness of the county roads in the shoulder season are all things Niagara cannot give you anymore. The County, as locals call it, still has the character of somewhere that has not fully decided to be a destination.

Sandbanks Provincial Park

Sandbanks is the reason I started photographing in PEC. The dunes at Outlet Beach are the largest freshwater bar dunes in the world, and the combination of the fine sand, the Lake Ontario horizon, and the light that comes over the water in the late afternoon is as strong a photography setting as anything in Ontario. I photograph at Sandbanks in the late afternoon before closing time and in the early morning on weekdays when the park is lightly attended. The dunes are large enough that moving two hundred metres from the main parking area puts you in a setting that looks completely uninhabited.

The Vineyards

The County has over thirty wineries and most of them have vineyard rows that give usable photography backgrounds. The ones I work with regularly are the estates that have a combination of the vine rows, a mature tree line, and a viewpoint toward the bay or the lake on the far side of the property. Norman Hardie Winery on the south shore and Sandbanks Estate on the west side of the county are the two I use most consistently, because both have the open pastoral landscape around the vine blocks and the light comes from the water to the south in a way that flatters the vines and the couple simultaneously.