Caroline Hancox

Before Caroline Hancox photographed a single wedding, she was photographing people and processes for The Department of Chemistry at Cambridge University. Her own about page names that job directly and treats it, half joking, as her actual photographic apprenticeship. The pivot came the way a lot of small photography businesses start: her first commissioned wedding was for her dad's boss, a booking she describes as terrifying and that, by her own account, went well enough to become a career. She has been photographing weddings for over a decade now, originally from Cambridge in the UK and based in Basel, Switzerland for nearly 7 years, and her site puts the tally at around 200 weddings and elopements photographed across Europe.

That career sits behind a site whose main navigation splits into 4 apparently distinct products: Weddings, Elopements, Microweddings and Families. Read as 4 services with 4 different scopes, that isn't quite what her own pages describe.

4 categories, 2 rates

Her prices page draws the real line, and it isn't the one the navigation bar suggests. She charges CHF475 per consecutive hour for "a shorter day, a civil wedding, an elopement or a small celebration," or CHF3500 for an 8 hour package, with more hours available on request. That's a split by duration, not by occasion: a civil ceremony, an elopement and a small wedding are all billed on exactly the same hourly basis, and only a full wedding day defaults to the flat package rate.

The category boundaries blur further once you read her own definitions. Her blog post on the subject admits micro weddings are "typically less than around 20 to 30 people," but concedes elopements and micro weddings "are not that different either," since an elopement was only traditionally a couple-only event and, in her words, "can be whatever you want them to be and have guests too." The one category that genuinely sits apart is Families: no guest count, no hourly bracket, nothing tying it to the wedding price list at all. Nowhere on the site is a separate family-session rate published; the only price list on the site is titled, plainly, "Wedding Photography Prices." A family shoot is documentary portraiture of a different subject, not a smaller wedding.

Photographing the legal part of the day

Under Swiss law, only a civil registrar can perform the legally binding half of a wedding, and only somewhere the relevant canton has approved for it; everything else, from a blessing to a black-tie reception, is symbolic. Hancox has a dedicated page for this specific appointment, and her own copy calls it "a legal requirement here in Switzerland" that "sometimes happens on a different day to a larger wedding" and, in her view, gets less celebration than it deserves.

She names Basel, Zurich, Bern and Luzern as the cities where she covers this appointment, and adds a Zurich-specific note of her own: couples there, she says, can register their marriage at Zoo Zurich. She also tells a story on the same page about a groom who left his wallet on the tram on his way to his own registrar appointment in Basel, then had to sprint down Freiestrasse to catch it before the next stop, made it, and still got to the appointment on time. It's a small, specific, plausible detail, exactly the kind of thing a photographer who has actually stood through dozens of these appointments would remember rather than invent. She describes real flexibility around the appointment itself too: squeezing a portrait session into 15 minutes right before a ceremony on one occasion, and spending an hour touring a city with a couple on another.

What the 8-hour package includes, and what it doesn't say

The CHF3500 package is the one line item on the site with real, checkable detail. It includes at least 500 high-resolution images, individually hand-edited rather than batch-processed; a password-protected online gallery hosted for 1 year, with the option to extend; printing and sharing rights; and travel anywhere within Switzerland at no extra charge, with only minimal expenses billed for anything outside the country. Booking costs a deposit of 25% of the total, with the balance due 1 month before the wedding date. An initial consultation happens in person for local couples or over FaceTime or Skype for anyone further away, which matters for a couple planning a Swiss wedding from abroad who can't easily meet before travelling.

None of that detail carries over to the CHF475-per-hour bookings. The site never states a minimum image count, a gallery duration or a travel allowance for a civil ceremony, an elopement or a small celebration booked by the hour; it simply doesn't say. A couple booking the shorter, cheaper option should ask directly rather than assume the 8-hour package's terms apply to them too.

The mood board and the fine print

3 of her 4 landing pages, Weddings, Elopements and Families, lean heavily on mood rather than information: phrases like "let's celebrate you" and "the perfection in the imperfect" do a lot of work and very little describing. Read on their own, they could belong to almost any documentary-style photographer working anywhere. The About page and the Civil Wedding page are where the site actually gets specific: the chemistry-lab origin story, the wallet-on-the-tram anecdote, the named cities, the exact price list. That gap between the soft landing pages and the concrete supporting pages is worth knowing before you get in touch. Come with questions about hours, deliverables and travel ready, because the answers exist, they just aren't on the page you would naturally start reading.

The portfolio backs up the range those pages describe rather than just the language. Recent galleries include a warehouse wedding at Ostquai in Basel, a hotel wedding at Les Trois Rois, a Zurich Stadthaus ceremony followed by a reception at Coco Bar and Grill, and a French chateau booking taken on as a destination job outside Switzerland entirely. The most recent dated gallery on the site is from February 2024, a Villa Seerose wedding in Zurich, sitting alongside a footer copyright still reading 2023, a small piece of site-maintenance neglect rather than any sign the business has stopped taking bookings. The contact page, with a working enquiry form, a direct email address and a Swiss mobile number, reads as current, and Hancox says she replies within 48 hours.

For a couple planning a Swiss wedding from outside the country, 3 things line up in her favour: an English-language site and, by her own account, an English-speaking practice from first enquiry to delivery; a stated willingness to travel outside Switzerland for what she calls "minimal" extra expense rather than a flat refusal to leave; and a documentary style that, on her own account, doesn't ask a couple to already know what a "Swiss wedding" is supposed to look like before they book her. The gap is in what isn't published: no stated minimum for anything shorter than the full 8-hour day, and nothing at all about the Vorbereitungsverfahren or the document timeline a foreign couple's own celebrant, planner or registrar would normally walk them through separately. That isn't a fault specific to this business. It just isn't a photographer's job, and Hancox's site doesn't pretend otherwise.