Earlier this year I had the awesome privilege to marry one of the most beautiful, fun, upbeat, and compassionate women I know. It was an absolutely perfect day, filled with our crazy friends and families from New York, as well as some locals we managed to befriend over the past three years. After attending (and photographing) dozens of weddings the stakes were high to make our day even more spectacular than the best ones that we had been to. And, even more challenging, to make it feel like we weren't just at another wedding, working the camera. The pressure was on. We picked our favorite parts out of each wedding we had been to in the past and added in our own little twists along the way.
We really wanted to have a garden/spring theme so we chose to do our ceremony at the beautiful Kilgore Lewis Gardens here in downtown Greenville, with our reception at Twigs Tempietto not far away.
To make our wedding just a little extra awesome, we tried to incorporate some of our favorite hobbies into the wedding. One of those is making wine. Now I've been to a lot of weddings where they have just the "red" and the "white" wine, and that has always irritated me deep inside. I mean if Jesus is going to turn water into wine at a wedding for his first miracle, I think more effort should be put into the wine. So we went all out. We handmade over 120 bottles of wine in 10 different varietals, and ordered custom wine glasses to give out as favors. It was a total hit! We even had some champion oenophiles try all 10 types of vino!
And then (naturally) the dancing started. This was a very important area for us. Mostly because we didn't want to make it feel like we were at "work". That means no "Celebration", no "YMCA", no "We are family", and no other cheesy wedding music (although we did allow the Cubic Shuffle). I was (and kinda still am) slightly obsessed with Dubstep/Trance so we incorporated a bit of that which to my surprise were some of the biggest hits on the dance floor! I guess there are at least 12 other people alive that enjoy this kind of music (or maybe it was just the wine).
By far the most important part of the day was the photography (imagine that!). So how does a wedding photographer pickout a wedding photographer? We met with a few local photographers and couldn't really find the exact style we were looking for. Although there are definitely some great photographers around here, we just couldn't find that person that really got us excited about the pictures. Too traditional, too edgy, too... flat... yea, yea call me picky! So we expanded our search. We had our "dream list" of photographers and at the very top of it was one of the best photographers that I know of: Susan Stripling. Although it definitely stretched our budget to the max to fly her down from NYC to shoot the wedding, I am so excited we spent the extra money in this category. You've heard it a million times but photography is really that thing that will be around long after the wedding day is over, and now I can say that from experience. The photos we have from our wedding really capture the beauty and emotion of the day and will grow in value over time.
So why am I rambling on about my wedding? Well, I've had a lot of requests from readers to share some of my wedding photos on this blog, so I figured I would finally put up some of my favorites from our day. Enjoy!
Yes... I was a mess the first time I saw her
We just had to take a shot with Susan
Thanks for looking! And thank you Twigs, Chris Cunningham, Susan Stripling, Kim Wehunt, and all our friends and family who helped make this day beyond perfect! You guys are truly the best there is!
