The New Normal

Updated: 07/10/2021 4:56pm

It won’t come as a surprise to anyone that over the past 18 months the travel and wedding industry the world over has been completely changed. While our little island nation had at first seemed to have dodged a bullet, we too would eventually suffer through the full brunt of the pandemic like so many across the world.

Despite the struggles, many in the tourism industry here at home have been, just like us, working diligently away (with many a mental health day taken…thank you Netflix), preparing for the re-opening of international borders, the resumption of travel and most importantly of course, WEDDINGS!

As a top priority we have put a lot of thought and planning into how best we can keep our clients and team safe while shooting weddings and sessions again. As part of this process we are feeling a little proud of ourselves for being the first and (currently) only photography/video team to have met the strict requirements and guidelines of the Care Fiji Commitment (CFC). The CFC is an initiative by Tourism Fiji and Fiji’s Ministry of Commerce, Trade, Tourism and Transport and is a WHO-approved standard of best-practice health and safety measures which are designed to align businesses within the tourism industry to safe travel norms in a post-COVID world. The CFC has also been endorsed by the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), who are the global authority on Travel and Tourism.

While most of the protocols we have implemented are internal and affect how we operate our office and editing bays with procedures such as the sanitisation of work stations, daily health screenings of our team, tracking the vaccination status of our team (100% FYI!), ensuring a socially distant workspace etc., there are a few protocols which will affect some areas of coverage.

What’s Different?

‘Getting Ready’ or Wedding Prep

This is generally where we will be spending the most time together in close proximity and we will be changing a few things to make it a little safer. Thankfully the changes wont affect how we work too much.

• First the basics; mask wearing by the team at all times, keeping a minimum of 8 flip flops apart where possible, liberal use of our bottles of pocket sanitisers and of course sanitising our gear before and after sessions.

• Our next change will be to the amount of time we spend with the bride or groom at any one time when getting ready. To help reduce our time together indoors we will be staggering our coverage to short 15 minute intervals. Surprisingly this isn’t too much of a change to how we would normally cover this part of the day when travelling between the bride and grooms rooms except for perhaps a few more steps for our pedometers…gotta close those rings!

• As standard our team will have their careFiji apps kept on and running at all times. The careFiji app is Fiji’s mandatory contact tracing app and is required to be downloaded by everyone including visitors entering the country. If for some reason anyone in the room doesn’t have their phone on them or the app isn’t running we will quickly get the contact details of everyone at the time and store these details for 28 days. This information will only be shared with the Ministry of Health if requested by them for the purposes of tracing a positive/suspected case.

The Rest of the Day

For the rest of the day, things will continue pretty much the same as they always have. Of course we will continue to keep our distancing, masks and apps on at all times but our style of shooting generally won’t be affected. When we take water breaks we will do so from further away, and if we are eating during the reception dinner that too will be done further away, but the rest will continue as normal.

We will keep this page updated as our protocols and procedures on our interactions are likely to change to keep up with current information and trends.

If you have any questions or are curious about any of our protocols or procedures we are happy to share!

Take care and we hope to see you SOON!