Countryside Finnish Wedding by Maria Hedengren

Maria Hedengren is a well-established wedding photographer in Finland, having been in the industry since 2008. She’s a talented artist who has been inspiring her peers for years, and continues to impress with every new wedding she shares.

This countryside wedding from Finland is filled with inspiring portraits and an interwoven story that is inspired by nature.

Follow Maria’s journey via Instagram, and enjoy Sanna and Topi’s story below!

Words & Images by Maria Hedengren

Sanna and Topi’s wedding took place in Topi’s grandparents home in Längelmäki, Orivesi, a region of Finland with stunning countryside.

Friends and family gathered at the house already the night before to clean and decorate their grandparents’ barn.

This wedding was a relaxing, warm and cheerful celebration. Sanna and Topi poured their hearts into their day, which wasn’t about how it looked, but much about how it felt.

The day was raw, real, and simple: just about everything I like about documentary photography.

A Beautiful Wooden House

After getting to know Sanna and Topi and their style, I knew I wanted to shoot the portraits in a birch forest. The day before the wedding I spent over an hour driving around the area on small country roads looking for the perfect patch of birch trees.

Initially I thought we would also do the “first look” photos there, but after seeing the grandparents’ pink wooden house, I realised I definitely wanted to include more of that beautiful house in my photos.

Sanna and Topi both got ready in different parts of the same house, which was built for two families, having two separate but similar looking entrances. So we used that as the “first look” spot, with the bride and groom each coming out from their side of the house and meeting in the middle.

Unexpected Inspiration

I’ve never felt inclined to shoot in a background full of flowers. Yet, as we were driving back to the home after the ceremony in Längelmäki’s old wooden church, I saw a patch of beautiful tall grass / flowers. I don’t know what plants those are, but the light coming through them was amazing, and I knew it was worth a quick stop. At the end we were all covered in fluff, but the moments we captured in that tall grass were so much fun!

A Photographer and a Mother

When I photographed this wedding, my youngest baby was 5 months old. This was not my first wedding of the season, in fact, I had also previously traveled abroad for a couple destination weddings, taking my baby along. But Sanna and Topi’s day was the first wedding when I decided to leave my baby at home. That 2 nights separation from a (still breastfeeding) baby come with so much emotional and physical ache.

The good part: the wedding day, though very relaxed, kept me busy and caught-up the in the moment, shielding me from thinking too much about what was going on at home.

The best part: two nights of uninterrupted sleep.

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