Top tips for booking adventure couples photoshoots - by Cara Mia

It was never my intention to become a photographer. I always loved writing and got my BA in English, and my original plan was to go to law school and write on the side. That didn’t happen, obviously. I lived in Nicaragua for a few years, and towards the end of living there decided to go on a study abroad in the Middle East. It was there that I met my cute husband (Dallin), we actually got lost in Petra together for seven hours without water and had to be rescued by Jordanian soldiers on an ATV. That’s where it all started!

We love to travel (been to around 30 countries in the last 3 years), but Dallin loved photography before I ever did. He bought me my first camera in 2017 in preparation for a trip to South Africa. I started off just taking photos of our own adventures, and eventually had a friend ask me to take her anniversary photos. So I charged her 50 bucks and went for it. Didn’t really know what I was doing, but I absolutely loved it.

From there it just became an obsession. I planned my own styled shoots and practiced almost every day until I mastered my camera settings, and made a point to take photos of couples everywhere I went. Eventually met local stylists and florists who invited me to shoot a tiny mountain wedding with them, and that was the first real wedding I ever shot.

I think a natural love of travel and adventure just naturally morphed into couples adventure photography. It was already what I loved to do, so it just kind of progressed from one thing to the next.

How do you find a good balance between work, life and travel, and your cats of course?

If I’m being totally honest, I’m still working on finding a balance between work/life/travel/and cats. I’m an Enneagram 7—and I think my biggest struggle even at 27 is learning to say no, especially to amazing opportunities. What I can say is that I’ve learned if you say yes to every single thing that comes your way, you are inadvertently saying no to spending time with loved ones and more fulfilling opportunities down the road.

I think having a full-time job really helped me hone in on what I love and actually want to do. I imagine everyone has their own advice on how you should go full-time, and for a lot of people, diving right in is the answer. For me, I kept a full-time job as a copywriter that let me work from home, and the stability of that allowed me to be more particular about what I booked and what I didn’t.

I think the longer I do this, the more content I am to slow down and just enjoy every moment instead of waiting for the next best thing. I also recommend blocking off time in your calendar for friends and family a year in advance (holidays, birthdays, weekends). It’s so important to make time for what you love, and not just get wrapped up in work. I definitely went through a phase when I was writing 40 hours a week and editing and shooting about the same amount of time, and I got burned out really fast.

Redefining success is important too. “Success” for me is not traveling every single week or booking 70 weddings. It’s taking on less in places I’m actually excited about with people who really connect to my work, which gives me more free time with my husband and cats.

How do you find consistency in your work when shooting in such a variety of locations?

I think it all comes down to storytelling. No matter where you go or who you’re with, you’re setting the scene. What did it look like? Who was there? What were the little details and moments that set the mood for the day? How was it unique? Showing things like the little droplets of water on grass if you’re hiking near a waterfall, and the really far away tiny-human landscape shots that remind you where you were.

I like to capture a combination of landscapes and then close-up moments. I’m aiming to tell the story of the place and also the couple—looking for the little moments when they’re being themselves. I think genuine emotion creates consistency over time. If you’re not trying to fabricate something and you just capture it as it really happened, that consistency creates itself.

I also plan my Instagram feed so that it’s color-coordinated and blends from one landscape to the next. I think that helps everything look a little less disjointed.

What tips do you have for new photographers wanting to get into adventure/elopement photography?

Step 1, travel! If no one is asking you to shoot in amazing bucket-list locations, take yourself and plan your own shoots. Make a point to find couples everywhere you go. Be the weirdo who goes right up to a couple and ask if you can take their photo (I’ve done that multiple times and so far never been turned down).

Step 2, I think more concrete advice would be investing in SEO. As a copywriter that’s what I do daily—incorporating keywords into copy in an authentic, human way so that you can rank for a term on Google. I know several photographers who build secret web pages with different keywords in mind (for example, “Morocco Elopement Photographer”) and when someone searches for that Google, their page comes up. I need to employ this on my current website (in the middle of a rebrand so I haven’t paid it much mind), but if you start Googling certain terms, you can see who comes up at the top of the search page and study how they did it.

Step 3, an easy tip is that you get what you promote. I post about a Hawaii elopement, I usually book another one. I went to workshops in Morocco and Bali last year, and this year I booked shoots in both places. I think it comes down to positioning yourself as an expert on a place, because if a couple has never been there before, they’ll rely on you to know where to go. So even if you can’t find a couple to shoot when traveling, I’d recommend taking a few extra days to location scout and build up your own personal map of places you’d like to shoot at someday.

Hope that helps!