There are hundreds of wedding venues all across Ontario with a wide range of backdrops and price points. It can be tough to find the perfect small wedding venue when they are not as prominent as the larger wedding venues. It can be hard to find a venue that not only fits your style and checks off all of requirements for your dream venue.

We are really lucky to have so many unique, small wedding venues scattered all throughout our beautiful province of Ontario, especially in Peterborough County, Northumberland County and the Kawarthas areas.  You can find anything from a rustic barn, A-frame cottage in the woods, brick warehouses, beautiful cabins overlooking the lake, wineries, breweries and so much more.

I have had the opportunity to be able to shoot at so many of these incredible venues in Haliburton, Peterborough County and Northumberland County and love finding hidden gems. Here are some great small wedding venues in this area. I have personally photographed at many of these and I will continue to add to the list as I hear about them or come across another beautiful spot. 

Although you might think it’s a good idea, I and many other professional photographers recommend that brides don’t spray tan before your wedding or engagement session! As a photographer, I see so many orange or overly tan brides in wedding photos. It looks way more flattering if the bride either embraces her natural skin tone or has just a hint of a tan from the sun. Given that we spend much more time analyzing images and editing them, we often know better than spray tan artists how the tans look on camera. ​

Cameras pick up red and orange more than the eye does in-person, so when a bride has a spray tan, she rarely has a pleasing skin tone in the final images. Even if the tan looks nice in-person, without fail it will always be very obvious in photos that it isn’t a natural skin tone. While I always do my best to correct for this in editing within the hired scope of my work, the end result can still be that the bride is more orange than everyone else in the wedding party. Whether my bride used a professional or DIY tan, it almost always looks very apparent in the final images. Natural skin tones photograph most beautifully. 

If your bridesmaids have not been tanning, you getting a spray tan creates a huge difference between the natural and orange skin tones in your photos: the bride will tend to look very tan (and often brown or orange) and, as a result, the bridesmaids will look much paler than they truly are. The same applies to a groom who has not been tanning. It is a very harsh difference between the spray tanned and not spray tanned group of people. ​