pursuing the picture perfect wedding
Eunice & Daniel’s wedding photographs are over on 100 Layer Cake today!! We love being on their very pretty blog! Hurray! Congrats to Eunice and Daniel, the whole Hello!Lucky crew, and all the other talented vendors who worked on this especially magical wedding.
Welcome to Eunice & Daniel’s wedding! Eunice and her sister Sabrina own Hello!Lucky, while Daniel designs video games at Three Rings, and frankly, I can’t think of a craftier, more inventive—or more exuberant!—crew to plan a wedding. Eunice designed pretty much everything and she and her friends, led by sister and maid-of-honor, Sabrina, worked tirelessly to make sure those designs became a reality. Much of the inspiration for the wedding’s design is from Tim Walker’s photographs. Walker’s work has always fascinated me, as it demonstrates, in intricate detail, how Britain was, is, and always will be a magical place, if improbably so. See his work, if you aren’t already familiar with it. You’ll know what I mean. The little stage Eunice and Daniel were married on and the whimsical parade to the ceremony site, led by Daniel with his white unicorn, are lifted straight from Walker’s (or … Eunice-and-Daniel’s) imagination.
Below: a few images from the ceremony. I love the flower girls dumping the confetti on each other!! The stage was lovingly made by the crew at Because We Can and painted by Eunice and friends. (The stage now has a home behind Eunice & Daniel’s bed, which is the perfect sort of re-purposing of wedding decor, I think). Eunice designed her dress and her friend and colleague, Hello!Lucky’s London office head, Iain Harris Bartlett, sewed it for her.
The day passed by at lightning speed, as it really always does at weddings. I was so happy to have a few moments with Eunice and Daniel along the winding dirt road and in the wide, grassy fields at {Wilbur Hot Springs}.
The details of this wedding were myriad, intricate, and marvelous. Nearly everything was made by hand, and much of it by Eunice, Daniel, and their friends. There was so much to look at (and photograph and share!) that I needed a dedicated post to do those details any sort of justice at all. Here are just a few, though. Sharla Flock designed the florals, which were rich and varied and added so much color and texture to the wedding. The cake topper is hilariously cute (worth clicking to enlarge!).
The guests were dressed to match the wedding perfectly, even the littlest ones. It gave me the feeling that we were all in a movie we couldn’t see being filmed.
As night fell, the party began in earnest. There was square-dancing and Eunice’s sister, Sabrina, sang a song. Their father accompanied the band on his mandolin for another song. And, yes, Eunice and Daniel really did cut the cake with a cleaver. I think Daniel might have a collection …
For fewer, larger photographs, please see {this gallery} on my main site. And satisfy your floral-detail-loving-cravings {here}. Hello!Lucky posted a great feature on their, site, too, complete with a gallery and diy wedding project instructionals, and it’s {here}.
photographs by Gia Canali; wedding design, Hello!Lucky; paper goods, Hello!Lucky and Joel Dewberry; wedding planning, Lisa Feldman Designs; Daniel’s dapper suit, Al’s Attire; bridesmaid’s dresses, Al’s Attire and Jessica Bobillot; Eunice’s fascinator, Jennifer Behr; cake topper, Publique Living; stage, wooden table “numbers,” and parade props, Because We Can and Hello!Lucky; lighting design, Jimmy Duhig, Creative Lighting Design; Eunice designed her dress and it was handsewn by her friend Iain Harris Bartlett. Go handmade!!
This post is just for all you lovers-of-minutia. Some of the details will be repeated in the main post about Eunice and Daniel’s wedding (coming later today!), but it’s fun to see them bigger and in context. We especially like the non-numerical table numbers. Had I been a guest, I’d have hoped to be seated at the dragonfly or goldfish tables. The tissue paper pom-poms, Eunice made by hand, are so pretty, too. And, I imagine, were a lot of work!! Click any image to enlarge the gallery.
photos: Gia Canali; floral design, Sharla Flock; cake topper; PubliQue Living; paper goods, Hello!Lucky and Joel Dewberry; table “numbers,” Because We Can with Hello!Lucky; lighting, Jimmy Duhig, Creative Lighting Design.
Eunice and Daniel’s May 2009 wedding was pre-slated for publication in Martha Stewart Weddings, so everything had to be top-secret until the magazine hit newsstands. And now it has. Of course, considering how I get around to blogging real weddings, it probably doesn’t seem like much of a wait at all! (Translation: even though I had almost a year to prepare images, I am still mulling them over in my usual poky fashion). So while I prepare blog posts and a gallery for the main site, I thought I would share just this one image.
photo: Gia Canali
Some of you might wonder where I’ve been, and the answer—at least in part—is that I’ve been locked up in my studio cooking up new things. (I’ve also been fixing my computer, hence the blog-neglect, but that is another story altogether). Anyway, I have been drunkenly in love with encaustic painting (and the idea of encaustic painting over photographs) since I first heard the word “encaustic” two years ago in an oil painting class, and even more so since I’ve seen them in real life. Then I saw some pieces by the ever-innovative Starn twins, I knew I had to figure out how to incorporate encaustic into my commissioned work. Over the summer I finally got a chance to take a workshop in encaustic painting and planned to get working on a series of encaustic photographs right away. But summer and wedding season are what they are, so refining the process and presentation has taken longer than I’d hoped. Encaustic paint is made from beeswax and resin, and because it can be both clear and cloudy in places, it’s very dreamy. I am not the only wedding photographer experimenting in this medium; both Elizabeth Messina and One Love Photo are also working in wax. I think these luminous little paintings are going to be one of the next big trends in handmade photographic prints. The tactile quality of the prints shows best in person, but I couldn’t resist sharing a few images anyway. And I promise to share more soon, as I complete new pieces.
photographs by Gia Canali
I think … we should rethink our eschewal of baby’s breath. In lavish quantities, all-by-itself, it’s so pretty and so soft. Like lace.
photos: Gia Canali
WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) is something we photographers talk about all the time when we’re printing our photographs. We want our prints to precisely match what we see on our computer screens. Obviously. We want to get what we expect. And with wedding photography, so do you.
So how does that work exactly, when you hire a photographer—or, now that I think about it, when you hire any vendor or artist? Well … we do what we do: what you see is what you get. So when you’re thinking about hiring someone, see enough of her work that you have a really good feel for what she does—a representative sample. This could include images on a website or blog, some albums, and perhaps a client gallery or run of proofs. By that point, you should feel like you “get” the scope and style of her work. If you like what you see in that photographer’s portfolio, chances are that you’ll like what she can do for you. But if you don’t, or if you yearn for something altogether different, no amount of direction, coaching, or unrealistic expectation is going to change how that photographer works or sees. You aren’t going to get something different.
Two stories to highlight this point:
Once I was at a meeting with a potential client. She kept pulling photographs out of my portfolio, dropping them on the coffee table, and pounding her forefinger on the photos,¹ asking over and over again, “Can you do this? Can you take photos like this?” I was boggled. What a query! I had, of course, taken all the photographs in question, and there were dozens of them. She had a whole, ever-growing pile of photographs she wondered if I could take. What she was really asking, of course, was whether I not I could take photos like that for her. But still. It’s ridiculous.
In another meeting, a potential client asked me, no less than twice, if I could take photographs like the ones taken by another well-known local photography studio. Um … why not just hire them? (I hope they did! Otherwise, they were surely and sorely disappointed.)
Neither one of these potential clients understood the principle of WYSIWYG. And I’m sure it’ll be no surprise to know that neither one of them hired me. Nor will it be much of a revelation to know that I’m relieved they didn’t.
So … hire a photographer whose work makes your heart go pitter-pat. Someone whose eye you trust. And then let her do her thing. (Why in the world would you want to interfere with what you trust is going to be marvelous?)
photo: Gia Canali
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¹ Yes, yes, she was smudging them to death.
