pursuing the picture perfect wedding
In fact: scratch that “when all else fails” business. Before all else fails, plan to enjoy the ride regardless. Weddings will always be full of the unforeseeable (and, really, that’s part of the thrill!). After all, the real reason we are gathered here today, so to speak, is the celebration of you and your beloved joining hearts and lives.
photo: Gia Canali
Meeting your expectations is (relatively) quite easy. Meeting our expectations is what you want to empower us to do.
photo: Gia Canali
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
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 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.
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?
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:
Even the wedding’s tiniest guests were dressed up and ready to party:
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
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.
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!!
photos, except magazine cover: Gia Canali
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.
