Nicole and Jordan got married in Hawaii, just the two of them. No aisle, no guest list, no seating chart. Exactly the wedding they wanted. So on the first of August, they came home to Central New York, threw a party for everyone they love, and while all those people were in one place we met for family photos at Verona Beach State Park.

That was the good idea, really. Everyone who mattered to them would be together in one place that day, for the first time in years. Why not make photographs while that was true?

Everybody wore Hawaiian shirts

I want to tell you about this first, because it’s the thing I’ll remember.

Nicole asked everyone to dress Hawaiian, since Hawaii was where they’d gotten married. She wore a white eyelet sundress and carried sunflowers. Jordan wore a white button-down. Everyone else showed up in palm trees, and almost all of them in blue: cobalt, turquoise, one shade after another down the line. One of the guys stood in bright blue with a baby on his hip, and the baby was in a matching little shirt, palm fronds and all.

They all did it, though. That’s the part. A theme for a party is an easy thing to shrug off, and instead every single person turned up in one. Nobody had been able to get to Hawaii, so they brought Hawaii home and wore it. That’s the warmest thing a family can do without making a speech about it.

Why Verona Beach State Park works for family portraits

Verona Beach sits on the eastern shore of Oneida Lake, an easy drive from Syracuse, Oneida, Rome, and most of Central New York. What I like about it is that you get all of it in one place. Beach and open water, but also grass, old trees, and foliage that does something different every month. You don’t have to pick.

There’s a paved path that runs along the water under those trees, with a split-rail fence on the lake side and the water going pale and wide behind it.

That path is the whole reason the location works for big groups. We were photographing at noon in August, which is not the light anyone would choose, but because that path is shaded, all of it softens. Everyone stays comfortable, nobody squints, and the lake still reads behind them. It’s one of the spots I keep coming back to as an intimate wedding photographer in Central New York, for exactly this reason.

There’s also room. We worked through a lot of combinations in about seventy minutes: Nicole and Jordan alone, each set of parents, siblings, grandparents, the friends who came, the cousins, and the kids who mostly wanted to be near the water.

Finally, we got all forty-some of them in one frame. Everyone got in, and everyone was still smiling, which is its own small miracle in August heat.

If you eloped and still want photos of your people

Eloping doesn’t mean giving up photographs of the people who raised you. It just moves them. You can marry each other alone on a beach in Hawaii and still have a portrait of your grandmother with her hand on your arm, taken a few weeks later on a beach closer to home. If that’s new to you, here’s what to expect from an elopement photographer in Central New York.

So if you’re planning something like this, whether it’s an outdoor elopement of your own, a party after one, or family photos while everyone’s finally in the same place, I’d love to hear about it. An hour at a state park is enough.

The real moments are the most beautiful ones, and they don’t stop being real just because the wedding already happened.