Halfway through Joseph and Janet’s ceremony, a tour boat packed with about a hundred shrieking middle schoolers cruised by, right behind them, on a field trip down the Cuyahoga River.

They didn’t miss a beat.

That’s the kind of day this was. Small, easy, completely unbothered by the things you can’t control. Joseph and Janet started out planning an elopement and landed somewhere even better: a micro wedding with about 20 of their closest people, split across two of my favorite spots in Cleveland.

First Look and Couples Photos at the Cleveland Museum of Art

We started at the Cleveland Museum of Art for their first look and portraits. I’d scouted the grounds ahead of time, so I already knew which corners I wanted to use before we even got out of the car — the colonnade out front, the quiet courtyard tucked behind it, the front steps with those huge columns.

Janet’s bridesmaid fussed over her train on the walkway while Joseph waited just out of sight. Then we brought him around the corner for the first time he saw her in her dress. That moment is always my favorite to photograph. Not posed, not coached, just two people reacting to each other.

From there we wandered the museum grounds for portraits. The marble, the greenery climbing the pergolas, that wall of columns. It’s hard to find a backdrop in Cleveland that does more work for a couple than CMA does, and it’s a big reason I keep bringing clients back here for micro weddings and elopements.

The Ceremony at AlleyCat Oyster Bar

From the museum, we drove down to AlleyCat Oyster Bar for the ceremony. String lights overhead, the Detroit-Superior Bridge as a backdrop, the river right behind the bridal party. With around 20 guests seated in a tight little semicircle, it had that rare feeling a lot of couples chase and can’t quite find at a 150-person wedding: like everyone in the room actually mattered to them.

And then, like all weddings, you never know exactly what’s going to happen.

Right in the middle of the ceremony, a Goodtime-style tour boat went by loaded with what sounded like a hundred middle schoolers on a field trip, all of them screaming and yelling at exactly the wrong moment. Joseph and Janet just laughed it off and kept going. A few minutes later: “I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

Honestly, it’s my favorite kind of wedding story. Not because anything went wrong, nothing did, but because it’s proof that the best days aren’t the ones where everything goes according to plan. They’re the ones where the couple doesn’t care that it didn’t.

Why I Loved This Day

Joseph and Janet’s wedding is a good example of what a micro wedding can actually look like in Cleveland: two incredible locations, a guest list small enough to feel personal, and zero pressure to perform for a crowd. If you’re planning something similar, whether it’s a true elopement or a wedding with twenty of your favorite people, I’d love to talk through how a day like this could work for you.

Planning a beautiful wedding or elopement and need a photography team that is pretty awesome?

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