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.

This is a view of our rental home from the location we’d later be married at. 

Detail shot of my maid of honor’s bouquet.

Detail shot of the mini orchids I had for my hair.

MY bouquet.  Isn’t it awesome?  That is exactly what I wanted too (inspiration pic was a previous weddings of Brooke’s). 

Detail shot of my bouquet in HDR.  Cameras cannot capture the range of colors that your eyes can see, so that is why so often you’ll hear people say that it was much better to see something in real life compared to their images.  It’s not a matter that they aren’t good photographers, it’s the fact that our eyes are just more advanced.  HDR photography comes a BIT closer to capturing the range of color that we can see… and here is my bouquet darn near exactly what it looked like on my wedding day.  I can almost SMELL it! 

My flower girl.  Her eyes are amazing!  She actually dropped shells instead of flowers 🙂

My maid of honor, her hubby and the flower girl. This is taken literally SECONDS before I walked down the aisle.  Almost all of these shots I took while the guests were being seated and my hubby was walking to the front.  I guess if you are holding a camera steady enough for this you aren’t nervous right!???

 

Thanks all for listening to my babble 😀