Tag Archive for 'Real Weddings'

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Collaborating With Your Wedding Photographer, 401: On Great Expectations

Meeting your expectations is (relatively) quite easy.  Meeting our expectations is what you want to empower us to do.

(Don’t get me wrong: there are plenty of wedding photography expectations floating around from you and your parents and your grandparents, and while these expectations also are exceedingly important to us, we understand them easily and well.  We’re going to meet them and then some. We’re just saying: even so, do everything in your power to make sure we can also give you the photographs we’re imagining for you.  We’re not aiming merely to meet your expectations.  We’re going for extraordinary, one-of-a-kind, ethereal, take-off-the-top-of-your-head photographs. And that’s what you want to empower us to do.  If anyone has great expectations of us, it’s us. Learning to play that to your advantage is what I’m hoping to teach you to do.).

photo: Gia Canali

Getting Great Wedding Photos, Tip #17: Be Enthralled!

I’m wading through the ever-increasing volume of images we’re making this wedding season, and certain things do stand out: like the rapture of a couple completely enthralled with one another.  They forget about me and the veil (between the presentation of themselves to the world and how they actually are when the rest of the world isn’t watching) disappears, if only for a second.

photo: Gia Canali

Low-Fi Love

In weddings, the imperfections are part of what makes everything so real and vibrant, so personal, so particularly you. The same could be said of wedding photos.  We like to give our clients lots of “perfect” pictures. But these sort of messy, imperfect ones always melt me, which is why I will continue to bring my crappy toy cameras with me everywhere.  Even to “work.” Even when I am frustrated with their unsolvable probably-part-of-the-charm limitations.

Low-fi photos bear a keen link to memory.  Other photos, the refined ones, show the wedding more perfectly than we can remember.  Lenses on fancy cameras are more perfect than the human eye … and the human memory.  But not these.

(p.s. This couple fantasized about all their guests shooting the wedding on their iPhones with Hipstamatic.  I think that would have been fantastic: like cameras-on-the-reception-tables v 2.0).

photo: Gia Canali

Negar & Peter’s Elegant Downtown Los Angeles Wedding

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Negar and Peter’s wedding was fantastically formal, glamorous, and richly textured in a way that very few weddings here in California ever are.  If I could think of one phrase to describe this wedding, it would definitely be, dressed to the nines.  Of course, that phrase makes a lot of sense when a fashion stylist weds a writer.

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Above: Tiny Pine Press designed and handmade these formal letterpress wedding invitations for Negar & Peter.  I love how they look like they might have come out of grandma’s wedding album … or an F Scott Fitzgerald novel.  They make me hope for a return to classical wedding design.

Negar & Peter had a traditional Persian ceremony, fireside, with a beautifully decorated sofreh. In Persian ceremonies, I love when all the girls (sisters, friends, mothers, aunts, etc.) get up and sprinkle the couple with sugar flakes.  What wedding couldn’t use a little sweetness like that?

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Negar called on her gifted pals, Joseph Free and David Rogers, who are usually busy designing events for Vogue and fashion designers, to design the florals and decor for her wedding. Inspired by their handiwork, and not surprisingly, this is the wedding that made me rethink baby’s breath.  Heaps of lacy-soft baby’s breath and the warm glow of candlelight, it turns out, are pure magic. Here are a few of the intricate and particularly stellar details:

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Even the wedding’s tiniest guests were dressed up and ready to party:

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We were honored to have this wedding featured in C Magazine’s C Weddings this April and are doubly thrilled that it’s being shown off on Style Me Pretty {here} today as well.

photographs: Gia Canali; venue, The California Club; invitations: Jennifer Parsons, Tiny Pine Press; floral design: Joseph Free; event decor: David Rogers; gown: Monique Lhuillier; bride’s jewels, vintage Neil Lane; shoes, Valentino

Eunice & Daniel’s Wedding in You & Your Wedding Day

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I just got a copy of You & Your Wedding, a British wedding magazine, in the mail.  It features Eunice & Daniel’s whimsical wedding.  I think they did a fantastic job highlighting the wedding.

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Catching Up On The News

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Wedding season and spring have both started a little bit earlier than usual, it seems.  Or perhaps I just feel like that because I’ve only gotten around to blogging about three of my weddings from last year and am well and happily into photographing this year’s weddings.  But I have managed to make a few more encaustic photographs along the way (and I’ve been cooking up some other goodies that we’ll share with you soon!) and other folks seem to be getting around to the blogging and publishing of my work much quicker than I have.  Above, from top left: encaustic photograph of Nada.  Her and Paul’s backyard wedding was recently featured on Style Me Pretty {here} and {here}; cover of C Magazine’s “C Weddings” which features Negar & Peter’s downtown LA wedding; and one of my Polaroid 55′s from Tom and Kimberly’s wedding which is featured on Snippet & Ink {here} today; detail of the encaustic photograph of Nada.  Below: another new encaustic photograph, this one of my cousin Bre and her husband on their wedding day (whose anniversary, come to think of it, is in three days!)  Happy Anniversary, Bre & Jeff!!

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photos, except magazine cover: Gia Canali

Eunice & Daniel on 100 Layer Cake!

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.

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Real Weddings :: Eunice & Daniel: One Lucky Wedding

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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.

{click any image to enlarge the gallery}

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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.

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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}.

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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!).

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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.

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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 …

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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!!