I apologize for my slowness in blogging – it has been a crazy busy month!!! It all ended last night with Heidi’s wedding which resulted in way too many pictures to even wrap my head around! Whew! I am mostly off for the next month (I do have a wedding on the 15th) so I plan on getting things caught up in a jiffy! Thanks for being patient!
A couple weeks ago I met up with Marcus and Celeste at University Circle for some engagement session fun! They were such a great couple to play with – they are obviously super cute and very in love. AND have fabulous taste in shoes and you all know that I love shoes! We spent an hour in the yummy evening sunlight taking pics around the park and having fun. I can’t wait for their wedding in Akron in October! It’s sure to be a fantastic day!
Enjoy some of my favorites from their session! Thanks guys! See you in a little over a month!!
On 08/16/08 Michael and Joan got married in Akron. I started the day out with Joan at the salon and watched her go from beautiful to more beautiful. She is also such a sweetheart! Her bridesmaids were commenting how she had that Jackie O like aura around her and she certainly did! The whole day was full of love and beauty – it was impossible not to notice how perfect they were for each other. It was also impossible to miss how deeply in love they were. They of course have the cute story to go along with their love – they were high school sweethearts that broke up and got back together later on after reconnecting. I LOVE that 
Thank you both for allowing me to be a part of your amazing day!
I also rarely try to promote one vendor over another but I have to put a word in for Nick of Big Ear Entertainment (DJ’s). WOW is all I can say. I’ve yet to have a single DJ be so on top of things and get the party going like Nick did. He was simply amazing! VERY professional and had a timeline ready for me of everything he had planned for the night which is all kinds of awesome for the photographer when someone is that on the ball. So if you are still waivering on a DJ I highly reccomend checking them out!
Vendors:
Salon: Sara Fraraccio
Ceremony: St. Hilary’s Catholic Church in Akron
Reception & Caterer: The University of Akron Ballroom in the Student Union
Florist: Stow-Kent The Towne Florist
Cake: A Bit of New York
DJ: Big Ear Entertainment
What a whirlwind the weekend of 08.08.08 was! Whew! I started off that friday at a wedding in Navarre, went down to Jordan + Cody’s wedding in Columbus on Saturday (with a quick stop for lunch with my wonderful sister and brother in law) and rounded out the weekend with a stop at Mohican State Park on my way home for an engagement session with James and Emily whom had just booked with me that week!
I picked Mohican because every time I am on my way home I always want to stop there but never seem to have the time or the motivation to do so (I seem to do most of my traveling to Columbus and back in one day). I have a love for covered bridges and forests so I was really excited when they agreed. Turns out that Emily (whom is originally from Millersburg but now resides near Chicago) hiked here a lot as a child so it has added sentimental value!
We started off at the covered bridge (which is not rustic and is a newly built one but still pretty!) and then went over for a few shots at the gorge overlook. It was a super sunny day with not a cloud in the sky so we’re going to go back for some yummy light shooting in the fall when they come back to the area again. I have my sights set on the fire tower and luckily they are down with that idea as well. They will be getting married on May 30th of next year so you’ll see them another time before they get married!!
Today marks the 1 year anniversary for me and my amazing hubby Chris. 
Since this is my blog, I am blogging about my OWN wedding for once!
We got married on the oceanfront on Whalehead Beach in Corolla, NC. Although we are both from Ohio, this was where both of us wanted to be married. Me moreso than my hubby but the Outer Banks are special to us both. My father and I spent many summers as I was growing up here and even more time once my family died (my mom and brother died when I was young). The house that we ended up getting married at, my father and I finally ‘settled’ on years ago and it became our favorite place on the beach. Sadly, my father died from cancer a year before our wedding. He asked that his ashes be spread behind the house we loved so much so a month after his death I went with his best friend and we let my Dad have his final resting place somewhere he loved to be. Call me morbid but to me, there was nothing better than getting married in a place that my father would still be able to be with us beyond just in spirit.
When I tell you brides that I know how much work weddings are – I KNOW! I planned the entire wedding – AND the trip and not just for me but for my husband and his family and our friends as well. No one besides us had ever been to the area before so everyone was clueless on how things went. Not only did I design, print and put together programs and menus but welcome baskets full of pages and pages of information for the guests on their rental homes, the locations and where to eat. Beyond that I designed the entire wedding and even though I may not have put together everything I picked out everything and let my vendors run with it. My vendors then hit it out of the ballpark.
Although ALL of my vendors were phenominal and so awesome to work with, there was one that was the best thing ever since sliced bread (and BETTER) and that was my photographer Brooke Mayo. I fell in LOVE with her work online and her personality literally leapt off of the pages. Without even talking to her on the phone, I knew I had to have her and she and I would get along great. I booked her instantly and never looked back once. During the days leading up to the wedding she was so amazingly helpful with suggestions for vendors and what to avoid but she would top herself when we went down for our engagement session.
Chris and I were stoked to be going down for our wedding planning weekend. Brooke has the awesomest packages of any photographer and I’m not kidding here. In some of her packages you get a weekend at her beach cottage with your engagement session for a wedding planning weekend. It is super secluded and the CUTEST little house I have ever seen. She has a knack for decorating, it’s adorable! We were greeted with some bottles of wine from her hubby’s winery (Sactuary Vineyars, if you are down on the Outer Banks you MUST get some, yummmmm) and were just so relaxed at her home. It’s so inviting. Sadly though not long after we arrived we found out that my future father in law had passed unexpectedly and we needed to get back to Ohio ASAP. Brooke went above and beyond what most people would do and was just amazing. She not only was super understanding on why we had to leave but was so accomodating and helpful that it made everything so much easier to deal with. I cannot imagine anyone else being more perfect for us at that moment than Brooke. She’s just that awesome of a human being.
So as you can imagine, we were already quite attached to the super Brooke before our wedding day and already loved her without her taking a single snap yet! However on the day of the wedding she won us over again. She’s just so cheerful and has an infectious personality, you can’t help but love her. THEN you see the images and you are floored. She catches every single moment and turns it into something even more amazing. The posing is so easy with her and nothing feels forced or faked. Of course I surprised her a time or two by doing things she wasn’t expecting (like running off into the ocean) but she was on her toes and kept right up with me. At the end of the night she even donned some goggles and went underwater to capture some seriously breathtaking shots of our first dance in the pool. Yes, you read that right. Our first dance was in the POOL.
I am not going to post any of her pics here because that would seem to be some sort of code of ethics rule breaking for me, but I am going to link you to her blog post about our wedding with the slideshow. I hope you enjoy the pics a quarter of the amount as I do… and I hope that a year from now you still love your images from me as much as I adore the images that Brooke took for us. Thank you Brooke
PS: This doesn’t mean that I don’t love my other vendors (Nannette from The Proper Setting, Renee from Blooms by Design, Nealy whom did my amazing invitations, Kimberly from The Delectable Dish, Dr. Dave whom is the best guy to marry you on the beach and so forth)!!! EVERYONE was amazing!
Here’s some pics that I took the day of the wedding. What? You mean I’m not supposed to be taking pics of my OWN wedding? Ha ha, as if!
I went down to the beach first thing in the morning/afternoon. All week I had been wanting to go to the beach but hadn’t been able to do so because I had things to do. So I said that I wasn’t doing ANYTHING that morning until I HAD to get ready and I went to the beach. The beach calms me and photography centers me so this was a perfect pairing.
Jordan was a semi-last minute bride coming to me later this summer through a reccomendation from a friend of mine. I did their engagement shoot at the end of July and was really excited for their wedding. They were a very relaxed couple and neither were very stressed out the day of the wedding which could not have been a more beautiful day! They got married at the amazingly beautiful Trinity Episcopal Church in Downtown Columbus and had their reception at The Columbus (Reinassance Hotel) just a few doors away where they partied all night long! This group was one of the funnest groups with most of the guests partying it out on the dancefloor all night and following it up with some more fun times in the hotel bar! Thanks guys for letting me be a part of your amazingly beautiful AND fun day!
Vendors/Locations
Church: Trinity Episcopal Church
Reception/Caterer: The Columbus Renaissance Hotel
Florist: Connells Maple Lee Flowers
Cake: The Cake Studio
DJ: Buckeye Sounds
