Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jennifer & Tom Mattera. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Jennifer & Tom, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Covid has brought about so many changes – has your business model changed?

Covid had a massive impact on our company not only from a safety standpoint, being in the wedding event industry, but its also pushed us to take a huge risk by moving across the country and rebranding our business to elopements.

We were 10 years into our business, specializing in traditional weddings on the East Coast and we were feeling really burnt out. We were spending more time planning logistics and working around all of the main events and traditions of a wedding day with large families and guest counts. We found ourselves spending the least amount of time on the creative part that we love, spending time with just our couples capturing moments of them connecting without any other distractions. We were so backlogged that our marketing took a backseat and we were literally struggling to complete projects and keep up.

Then covid hit and things got worse. Now we were scared that we would even have a job! The event industry shut down and then started re-opening with different rules in each state. So now we were spending most of our time keeping up on the day to day rules and implementing new policies as weddings started to open up again.

Then there was the fear of attending events and trying not to get sick. Because it’s just the 2 of us, getting sick would mean we could not work, and this just added more stress.

It was during this time that we really started to rethink our path. We knew that we needed a change but we felt trapped trying to keep up. Micro weddings and elopements started to become an option for couples who had to change their wedding plans.

We had already captured elopements in Joshua Tree National Park and in Iceland pre-covid and we absolutely loved it. we just couldn’t find a way to make it profitable. It was mainly because we were living on the East Coast which is not a popular elopement destination. All of the work that we were drawn to was in the American Southwest. We knew that it would be too complicated and costly to travel by plane for all of our jobs, so we always just looked at our elopement jobs as our fun once or twice a year elopements that would pay for a trip and provide us with a few days of creativity and exploration to fill up our adventurous spirits. But it was never enough.

Normally we would be totally booked up with weddings in the spring, but in 2021 we were wide open because of covid. Everyone was rescheduling for the fall. So had a rare opportunity to explore. We started researching online and learning about elopements throughout the Southwest in places like Utah and Arizona. We were getting so excited about the idea of traveling to the epic locations and doing our own photo and video sessions.

So we did something spontaneous and we planned and booked a monster cross country road trip from Pennsylvania all the way to Utah. We set up 5 styled elopement photo and video sessions in National and State Parks throughout southern Utah and Arizona. It was a 3 week trip that changed our lives. We felt so alive traveling and exploring and we fell in love with the desert and the mountains of the West. These elopements brought out our creativity and got us really excited. We felt like little kids in the biggest playground. It was on this trip that we decided to make a plan to move out West and rebrand our business from traditional east Coast Weddings to elopements in the American Southwest.

So we made a 2 year plan to make the move. It was very exciting and extremely scary! We started to rebrand our website for the Southwest and we stopped booking East Coast weddings. Typically we would book about 1 year out so we would rely on retainers for income and start to fill up our schedule for the year ahead. We finished out our previously booked jobs which took us to the end of 2022. We sold our house (which we loved) packed up our 3 cats and drove across the country to Las Vegas in February of 2023. When we arrived we had no work booked for the entire year. We also had to find a house because we had 2 months in our rental home.

It was frightening! But we believed that we were on the right path and we have been working hard to get started here in a new market. We contacted several local elopement photographers and we have been working as associate photographers and videographers for them. This started giving us cash flow and has given us so much experience of the local market here in Vegas. We are very grateful for their help and for being so welcoming to us.

Our original plan did not even involve doing work in Las Vegas. We moved here to be within driving distance to various National Parks where we would intend to work, like Joshua Tree, Death Valley, Zion, Moab and many others.

But, we discovered that we really love doing the fun Elvis elopements in downtown Las Vegas and well as the surrounding local desert locations. So now we are working this into our rebranding to not only market for adventurous elopements in National Parks through the Southwest, but we are also targeting the local Vegas elopement market.

We are finding that doing a mixture of both is feeding our creative needs for nature and city vibes. And all of the elopements are focused on the couples and their experience in a new and exciting place rather than on the big wedding with lots of guest and events.

We’ve only been here for 5 months and in that time, we bought a house, fixed it up, photographed/filmed over 20 elopements and now we have a break in the summer due to the heat. So we are now in the process of working on our website SEO, re-designs, and implementing a serious social marketing plan in order to generate more inquiries for the remainder of this year and next year. In addition to working for other photography companies, we have already booked several of our own jobs and some more inquiries are starting to come in. We have a long road ahead but it is already proving to be very promising.

Jennifer & Tom, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

We’re Jennifer & Tom Mattera, and elopement photographer and videographer duo based in Las Vegas, Nevada. We both come from creative backgrounds. Jennifer’s background is in photography, fine art, graphic design and marketing. Tom’s background is in filmmaking.

We were both in search of doing something that we would feel passionate about and we found it when we received our own wedding photos and video. They were done so creatively, and as artists, we really appreciated the process and found it very exciting. But more importantly, they made us cry and really meant something to us. We thought, how cool and rewarding would it be to be able to provide this service for other people. And that’s when we created Tree of Life Films & Photos.

We provide photography and videography services for couples who are traveling to epic outdoor destinations throughout the American Southwest and also for couples who are channeling their inner rock star and eloping in Downtown Las Vegas. The experience that our couples have is so important to us. One of the reasons that we gravitate towards these environments is because we and others go to these places to get away from daily life and stresses, and to explore a new and exciting place where we can focus on one another.

We believe that all of our couples should have their memories captured through photos and video. Photographs really capture a fragment of a moment in time. In daily life, we can get pre-occupied and not make time to remember. Photographs give you the opportunity to take a moment to sit and truly reflect. Video does more work for your brain and helps to fill in this blanks. It also offers movement and sound, for a fully immersive experience.

Offering both photo and video within the same company keeps it simple and seamless. It’s much easier for our clients to book one company with one vision rather than 2 companies with different approaches creatively and logistically. Our clients will have the same style and the same experience during their session. We have a very candid approach to get truly genuine moments but we also mix in some really cool editorial imagery as well. It’s a lot of fun!

We help our couples plan their elopement experience. It can be overwhelming figuring out exactly what an elopement is, how to plan one and even where to go. We’re here to help couples with elopement day timelines based on our previous elopements and we research new places if we’ve never been there.

We’re here for couples with an adventurous spirit who want to do something different that the traditional wedding. We’re also here for the ones who may feel like they are all by themselves because they aren’t meeting their family’s expectations for a big wedding because it’s just not for them. We were those people and we totally get it.

In our photography and videography, we are very much inspired by our environment. That’s why we like to immerse ourselves in the middle of the desert or on the edge of a canyon at sunset or sunrise. It’s an amazing experience to us every time. We tend to attract couples who share the same love for nature.

We also feel equally creative with the grit and art of the city. The way the sun hits different parts of the streets is always changing and creating new opportunities. And our Vegas couples are all dressed up and having a blast with it. It’s so much fun!

Although the locations, lighting and compositions are very important and inspiring to us, the number one thing for us is to capture the essence of our couples love and personalities. We want them to look back and really feel their love and relive their experience together every time.

The most effective thing that we do to make our couples feel comfortable is to connect with them. One of the things that we are most proud of is at the end of our sessions, couples that we meet for the very first time thank us for making them feel so comfortable and they tell us they felt like they were hanging out with friends.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

It’s very rewarding to get do do something creative for a living for a couple of reasons. First, it’s really hard to do something creative and get paid to do it. Since we were kids, we were both really into art. Jennifer would draw and paint. Tom was into drawing. Jennifer got a Fisher Price video camera and she felt so creative making films at a young age. Tom really got into filmmaking after high school. When we were young we really didn’t see how we could support ourselves by doing something creative.

It’s been a long road to get here. Jennifer went to college for graphic and web design where she also studied photography. She also got a degree in marketing. Then she worked as a graphic/web designer and event coordinator for advertising agencies. But going into an office every day and working on projects that she wasn’t passionate about was very unfulfilling and draining. She went on to work as a freelance artist on the feature film, “The Fields.” She worked as the still photographer, the web designer and she painted artwork to be used as props.

Tom went to college for engineering and then went back to school for filmmaking within one year of graduating. The dean of the film department told him to stick to engineering if we wanted to make a good living. Tom graduated and made his feature film directorial debut which received positive reviews from critics, screened internationally and was distributed by Sony and Netflix. This was very rewarding but Tom continued working in the engineering field because he didn’t get paid and to make the movie, he actually invested a lot of his own money in it. He was then hired to direct another feature film but the producers were very unfair to work with which made the experience a negative one.

So we were both getting paid to work in creative fields but we were not getting to be truly and fully creative with our work. That’s the tricky part of getting paid to be an artist. True art is completely honest. It’s an interpretation coming from the artist. It comes form the artist’s experience, personality, point of view and ultimately from their soul if they are really letting go and taking risks. That’s where the best art happens. When there’s a boss or a producer and there is money involved, the artist has to answer to all of these people and ultimately they are serving a company to provide a service or generate a product.

The reality is that most of us need to work for the majority of our time on this earth. The idea of spending that time in an environment that we do not like and doing something that we are not into just made us feel like we were dying slow and painful deaths.

When we started Tree of Life, we did it because we wanted to create an environment where we could be free to be true artists. We wanted to create a job for ourselves that we would truly enjoy and be passionate about.

We are both extremely hard workers. We still haven’t learned the work life balance thing but we are working on it. The thing is no matter what job we do, we give it our all. So we said why give all that energy to a company that we don’t care about when we can give all of that effort and creativity to our clients. Not only will we benefit from getting to do something creative for a living that we care about, but they also will be getting the very best that we are capable of offering in the photos and videos.

We keep ourselves aware of what other companies are doing in our industry but we never fall into the trap of doing what everyone else is doing because it’s popular and appeals to the mainstream. We don’t connect with most of the mainstream trends and styles and if we gave in then we would be right back in our office jobs trapped again.

We always create work that we are excited about and inspire ourselves to take risks and try new things. We have always put our work out there exactly the way that we want to make it. We know that it’s not for everyone and that’s ok. It’s for the people who see it and love it because they connect with it. It’s for the people who like it because it’s different from the mainstream. Everyone needs something to connect to and someone to connect with. As long as enough people that respond to our work and to us as individuals find us and trust us to go on their elopement adventure with them, then that is all we need.

And what is really meaningful to us in particular with what we do, is that when our clients receive their photos and films, they are genuinely moved by them. We are capturing there love for one another on a day that they planned, set aside and traveled far to get to. They are proclaiming their love for one another in the most honest way. This is such a huge moment for them in their relationship. It’s one they will always remember and it will have a special place in their heart. They may even come back to visit on their anniversary year after year and it all started here.

We are so grateful that our couples value our work enough to invest their hard earned money into us and our product. They are putting their full trust into us to capture their once in a lifetime moments and create something that will represent their personalities, their adventure and their love for one another.

This job, especially after our long path to get here, and the fact that we are providing a positive experience and a product that will bring our clients joy, is truly and deeply rewarding.

One more note about this topic is that creativity is ever evolving. Even within our company that we created for ourselves to be creative, it has lead us down an unexpected path. We started with traditional weddings in ballrooms. Then we pursued barn/farm weddings and industrial warehouse/city weddings. Now we are pursuing intimate elopements in the middle of the desert and on the edge of mountains as well as iconic Elvis Las Vegas chapel elopements. It’s very rewarding to work very hard at creating our own path and to keep riding the wave.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

Yes! We both went to the same high school. Jennifer liked Tom but he didn’t know Jenn (it was a big school). It’s a good thing because I (Tom) had a lot of growing up to do haha! Then, years later, a mutual friend (who knew of Jenn’s crush on Tom) set us up to meet one another during a group hang out at a local bar.

We started conversations through emails and then went on our first date. It wasn’t long before we were dating!

We really connected on so many levels. We had so much in common from a social standpoint (both being different from the mainstream) and we loved the same music.

Our first glimpses of adventure and being a photo/video team came early on. On one of our first dates, after a movie we snuck into an abandoned building (it was a location in Tom’s first film that he was talking about) so Jenn could check it out. The fact that she was up for it and walking across the muddy grass in heels was one of the coolest things for Tom.

Tom took Jenn as his date to his holiday work party. They spent half the time in the basement of the mansion doing an impromptu photo shoot with another couple, all dressed up and posing, taking cool shots with all of the interesting backdrops. Who knew we would end up doing that for a living!

We dated for 2 years, got engaged and got marred 4 years after we met. We had both been through so much together in those 4 years. In our professional lives, we were both going through all of the struggles of our jobs and not having that true creative outlet that we were seeking.

When we started our search for our own wedding photographer and videographer, we were introduced to a world of creativity within the wedding industry. We never thought of wedding photography or videography as being something that was tastefully creative. Everything that we saw growing up was cringe worthy haha!

Our experience with our wedding photo/video team was wonderful from the start. They were a married couple and we met them at a Starbucks over coffee. We hung out for over 3 hours! We felt like we were friends from the start. They made us feel so comfortable in front of the camera during our engagement session and on our wedding day. Then we were were blown away by the photos and video. They were an inspiration to us to model our clients’ experience after our experience with them.

Both of us being creative individuals and having the same tastes and style with just about everything, we got really excited the first time that we filmed a wedding together. We combined both of our backgrounds and started Tree of Life immediately after that job. We consider ourselves so lucky to have a relationship where we can be around each other every day and work together and we love it. We love being around one another and it’s safe to say that we are inseparable.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.treelifefilms.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/treeoflifefilmsandphotos
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TreeofLifeFilmsandPhotos
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmF6tOA-7rVYlGvZ7RrUpCA
• Other: https://vimeo.com/treeoflifefilms

Image Credits
Tree of Life Films & Photos