So imagine my shock when I found out that my stepmother’s mother, Cay, had Ansel as her wedding photographer! Yes, you read that correctly. World famous landscape photographer and all around legend photographed a wedding.

My step-grandmother got married in Yosemite, on the lawn of her fathers house; he was the superintendent of the park and as such was living in a beautiful spot along the Merced River. Cay remembers that they had a great view of Half Dome from the front yard and Yosemite Falls could be seen from the back.

During this time Ansel was doing quite a bit of work inYosemite, having a dark room set up in Best’s Studio, a studio started by his father in law in the Valley. Since Cay was going to school in Arizona, before she got married, she had even bummed a ride, or two, with Ansel to and from school, as Ansel did work all across the West.

Cay remembers one time when Ansel was in town he came over to her sorority to take her to lunch. The gossip about the bearded, scruffy looking man, who took her to lunch, went on for a few days afterwards.

Cay says father must have paid Ansel some money for shooting her wedding, but she doesn’t know how much. She does remember though, that he brought along a second photographer to help during the ceremony. Her favorite photo from her wedding is the one of her in front of Half Dome, though she does remember it took Ansel quite a long time to get it to be perfect and, at the time, what she really wanted to do was go down and go swimming with her new husband.

As a wedding present Ansel presented Cay and Andrew with a print of Moon Rise Over Hernandez on the back porch of her parent’s house. To this day that print hangs in her home.

As a wedding photographer myself, I do love to tell this story. I am not going to lie, it tends to impress people, just a little, and I love the thin connection it gives me to a man whose work I am in awe of.

Part II

After the venue was set, a huge weight was lifted off our shoulders. With my wedding planner book in hand, now all I had to do was follow the to-do lists and keep on time with everything. We knew that simple was what we wanted, but not DIY simple which I knew would make me absolutely nuts. Doing any one thing 100 times seems to take the fun out of it. The few things that I did do were: guest favours, the seating chart, the guestbook, and the table numbers. For the guest favours Eric and I picked blackberries and I held an Aunt’s and Mom’s jam party. We made enough jam to fill over 100 little jam jars and my Mom and Mother-in-Law cut the cloth and lavender flowers (from my backyard) for the final touches. A few days later, I had some girlfriends over to put all the pieces together. It was a fun way to have girl time and we ended up with some nice, but very inexpensive favours. For the seating chart, I bought a cheap canvas from an art store and painted it.

The guest book was just a plain recycled/reused paper book with a hard cover. I opted out of buying a ridiculously expensive “proper” guestbook and instead bought lacy see-through paper to cover the front and back covers of the book. I then glued little envelopes inside the book and cut little pieces of fancy paper for people to write notes on and tuck inside the envelopes. I gussied it all up with ribbon, the same ribbon we used to tie the rings together for the ceremony. If memory serves right, the guestbook idea came from a Martha Stewart craft idea I found on her website. The table numbers were tent cards I made from white card stock and I chose pictures to draw on each one (flowers (my thing) and motorcycles (Eric’s thing). The tent cards actually took the longest amount of time, but since there were only 10 it wasn’t a big deal.

My Mother-in-Law and her best friend did 4 gorgeous flower arrangements for the ceremony, the guestbook table, and the bar in the Ciderhouse. Sea Cider provided the tin vases and my Mom-in-Law bought the flowers as a gift. I also managed to get some pampas grass for free (I’m a gardener so have access to plants) which made quite a statement in their arrangements. And finally, my amazingly talented Aunt made the cake! So there were a lot of personal touches to the wedding by a number of friends and relatives. I am truly grateful to have so many ladies in my life that were willing to donate their skills and time.

I think if there was one thing I would recommend to anyone planning a wedding, it would be: keep it simple. The more carried away with details and expectations that you get, the more frazzled, stressed, and disappointed you are likely to be. Enlist the help of anyone you can think of that has a skill or talent you could use. Believe me, people are so happy to be involved. Really! And having family and friends involved in the creation of a wedding personalizes it more than you and your future hubby spending 3 months of weekends making paper cranes and lanterns. Make sure the important things are looked after by people you can trust. Good venue, good food, good liquor, good music. And of course, good photographer!! Everything else is extra. As a bride, you have so much on your plate, and adding to it with DIY details can be a nightmare. I know now that having a low key wedding, especially an at-home one, puts a lot of pressure on the bride, groom, and relatives to do it all. Sometimes it’s nice to enlist the help of professionals so that you and your family can enjoy the day stress-free. But if you really want to do it the full-on DIY way, go for simple, simple, simple. No frills, just the basics. The basics of a wedding will take up all your time anyway!

Even though our wedding went over our initial budget, we are glad we did it the way we did. With all the professionals we had, it was absolutely flawless. The food was incredible, which was really important to us, and we had extremely positive feedback from all the guests. Most saying it was the best wedding they had ever been to. I know I am biased, but I think it was the perfect blend of professionally done and personal touches. There was enough of Eric and I in it to make it feel like us, but not so much that it felt disorganized and haphazard. We had expectations and standards of what we wanted and in order to get them, we realized that having professionals to do the big stuff was necessary. I guess that would be my second most important tip: make sure that your expectations are in-line with your budget.

And with all that said, I wish all you future brides out there the best of luck with planning and the most fun on your day. It truly is one of the best days of your life, guaranteed.

Another note from Jesse: Jenn and Eric also hired Vanessa from Verbena Floral Design to do their bouquets, boutonnieres and a some table top decorations. I even had the pleasure of getting a behind the scenes look at their work for this wedding, which can be seen here.

Last year Eric and I started along the journey of planning a wedding. At first, I had very romantic notions about the ceremony and party that I wanted (Eric was easy, for him the only thing was no church). I wanted an outdoor ceremony, preferably in a forest or overlooking the ocean, at night or dusk, preferably under the full moon, followed by a backyard/house party reception. This to me was the ideal wedding. Casual, romantic, unique, outdoors and simple, family and friends oriented. This obviously did not take into consideration any logistics howsoever and maybe if I had been more headstrong, more brave, I would have tried to see it through. But, upon mentioning my ideas to the older women in my life, I was met with lots of head-shakes and doubts.

“What if it rains?”

“Your Grandma won’t be able to make the hike into a forest, or up a hill.”

“Where will people sit?”

“Will everyone stand for the whole ceremony?”

“And what about photos? It will be too dark for good ceremony photos.”

So the woody/hillltop/night ceremony idea was thrown out the window. We thought about an outdoor daytime ceremony, but just couldn’t figure out where we could go with 100 people and whether we were willing to chance the weather (we were aiming for a late August or September wedding). Next it was the reception. Eric and I rolled this around in our heads for quite some time. Who did we know with a big enough house to have a proper reception? I have a very large family so we knew that the guest list was going to be close to, or over 100 people. We thought, ok we don’t know anyone with a nice big house and beautiful garden, let’s just have it at our house! Again we were met with the logistics.

From the parentals:

“You only have one bathroom, you’ll have to rent a porta-potty” (gross)

“Will you rent a tent for outside?”

“Who will cater?”

“Will they do all the clean-up too?”

“How about the neighbors and noise bylaws?”

“Do you really want the headache of having the wedding at your own house?”

The list went on… Maybe a more creative person would have found a way around this, someone who was more in-tune with alternative wedding sites and options, Eric and I however, had only been to a few weddings, and they were all pretty by-the-book or extremely low-key involving few guests and a nice big house with an established garden. More and more it seemed that logistics were really determining what kind of wedding we were going have, and not our/my romantic notions of casual house-party style festivities.

So after we got that through our heads, we decided to hunt for “proper” venues. We knew we wanted something with a homey feel so we started looking at B&B’s and wineries. Unfortunately, all of the B&B’s we looked at had a very low guest limit or a very high price. Wineries proved to be too restrictive with liquor rules, and that’s when we finally ended up visiting Sea Cider Farm and Ciderhouse. We liked the atmosphere right away. Small-ish, barn-ish, an outdoor reception area, a beautiful orchard, and a lovely wrap-around deck. We loved the big wooden harvest tables and the idea of having an “Apple Wedding”. After we talked with the event coordinator, we were pretty much sold. Sea Cider knew how to do weddings and we needed solid guidance. We decided to have the ceremony and reception at Sea Cider since we thought one stop for guests was pretty convenient. And since our ceremony time was later than most traditional ceremonies, 5:30pm, we could go right from ceremony to dinner to party. Perfect.

Check in next week for the rest of Jenn’s story! 

I’ve been reading a lot of Meg Keene’s A Practical Wedding, and in general just thinking about how to better marry my business and core beliefs, so in the next few weeks I’d like to offer some recommendations, of my own, on wedding planning. In no way will this be a comprehensive guide, or do you need to take it all to heart, but I hope it helps. Most of my advice will be based on Victoria weddings, as that is the primary market I serve, but I hope that some of the advice is universal.

This week I will start by re-posting what I wrote for Home for the Honeymoon:

Although I really don’t consider myself an expert on weddings or marriage, I have been married a year-and-a-half now, and in the last three years I have attended over 40 weddings, so I do have some experience.

As a wedding photographer, I’ve seen a range of weddings…. From the simple and frugal to the all out GLAM, and I love the variety in seeing what people do for their big day.  I think it is great that couples haven’t lost sight of the fact that you really can do whatever you want.

If you are a bit of a traditionalist, you are free to go to the chapel and get married.  However, if you want to break out of the box and walk barefoot on a beach somewhere far away from home, then you should be able to do that too – guilt-free!

All weddings are going to follow a general format:  Get married, take some photos, eat something and have a party.  That said, there is a lot you can do to make your wedding feel personal.  The important thing is to show off who you are as a couple.  You really can do whatever you want!  Truly!

The only legal requirement at your wedding is signing your marriage license. (And you can even do that beforehand or after the fact!)  You have absolute free reign for the rest of it!  However, you should never feel like being different means you have to break the bank planning a ton of details.

One of the things that makes a wedding stick out from the rest is when a couple approaches a traditional aspect in a fresh new way.  This doesn’t mean a ton of DIY details or vintage-style décor, it can be as simple as having a custom drink that reflects something special about you as a couple.

At one wedding I recently shot, the couple served beer-geritas (I’ll let you figure that one out – I’d never heard of them before either, but they were delicious)!  Another wedding I photographed was an afternoon picnic in the park.  And at one wedding, in a church no less, the bride walked down the aisle barefoot… In fact, she didn’t wear shoes the entire day!

A dear friend of mine got married this past summer and I had the honor of photographing it. One of the things that I loved about Anita’s wedding was that every part of it was a reflection of her and her husband.  In some ways, her wedding was similar to other modern weddings, but she found unique ways to do her own thing as well.

My favorite deviation from the norm was instead of eating cake, my friend and her husband made an ice cream sundae together instead.  Why not?  If you don’t like wedding cake, or you are part of the growing population of people who find themselves skipping flour due to gluten intolerance, maybe ice cream is a good substitute.

With so many wedding blogs out there, it can get really overwhelming to make decision.   But just because you see everyone else utilizing mason jars, burlap and ribbons in trees, it doesn’t mean you have to follow their lead….

One of the weddings that I am most looking forward to next summer is inZionNational Park. The couple is hiking up theNarrowsbut will spend zero dollars on ceremony décor because Mother Nature is taking care of it for them.  Sometimes Mother Nature really does know best!  If the weather is permitting at your ceremony location, why stress out and try to improve on something that is 4.5 billion years in the making?

In the same way that it is important to find a photographer that suits your style – and let’s be honest, your budget as well – my advice is to not feel pressured into doing something at your wedding that doesn’t reflect who you are.

I know it seems like there are a lot of wedding photographers who spend a lot their time ooohing and ahhhing over how great the details are at a wedding, but it really comes down to this: you, your spouse and the people you love and value and want to share your special moments with.

As a photographer, I am with you on your wedding day to chronicle the two of you in one of the most intimate and memorable moments you will ever experience.  Hopefully, when you look back on your wedding photos, you will remember that amazing feeling of being surrounded by all those people who love you and who want to be witnesses to a milestone in your life.

It really should be about the people you love, and not about stuff that dressed it all up.

Styling by Marion at Ma-Luxe :: Makeup by Carly Flint :: Video by Charlotte Wood :: Flowers by Tina at Platinum Floral Designs

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• January – CLOSED – this shouldn’t be surprising
• February – One spot available
• March - Two spots available
• April – One spot available
• May - Two spots available
• June – Three spots available – did you know there are FIVE Saturdays this year in June!
• July - Two spots available
• August - Two spots available (maybe only one)
• September - Three spots available (maybe only two)
• October – Two spots available
• November – One spot available
• December – CLOSED

Also, to anyone planning a wedding please check out these awesome (and totally FREE) spreadsheets that the awesome ladies at Lowe House Creative and A Practical Wedding have put together. Also, if you are looking for sane wedding advice you should check out A Practical Weddings site in general. They have some great vendor recommendations and Meg, who runs the blog, also just published a book (which I have ordered). She just released these shareable ads today, which I found highly amusing. This one was my fave:

And if you are getting married in California and really want to stay super sane on your wedding day hire Elizabeth from Lowe House Creative. She is a no nonsense gal who knows how to throw a killer party (I worked with her at Anita and Wayne’s wedding last summer).

One last note, I do have a separate calendar for non-wedding shoots, so please get in touch if you are interested.

Six weeks ago, I had the joy of working with five fabulous women and one dapper looking dude. The ladies over at Home for the Honeymoon asked me to help them shoot some promotional photos for their website and blog. It was a packed day full of laughs and a lot of fun. This shoot couldn’t have happened without a number of people, so big thanks to Carly Flint for helping with the makeup, Marion at ma-luxe studios for all her expertise in hair, make up and styling,  Tina from Platinum Floral Designs for the flowers, Tyler and Paige from Coultish Management,  Sheri from Victoria Bridal Boutique for letting us use a great tea length dress, and Chris Gill over at the Condo Group for allowing us use of an amazing condo. Here are a few out takes from the day, and even more can be found over on the Home for the Honeymoon blog.