Sharine + Zack | Santa Cruz | House | Backyard Wedding

When you think of backyard weddings, small and intimate come to mind.  Mainly, because backyards are pretty small, at least the backyard that I grew up in.  Well, Zack's stepdad's backyard was definitely not small.  His beautiful home was way up in the hills and only accessible through this one lane road.  The road opens up to this curvy driveway and out pops this amazing home with views to die for.  It's the perfect backyard wedding venue that isn't available to the public.  I know, sad.  We loved shooting there and hope that we get more backyard weddings in the future.  

For the wedding to look this good though, it took Sharine's sister, Clarice, the better part of a year to mastermind everything.  She's definitely got an eye for detail and created an amazing wedding for her sister.  She recently started her own business designing pieces for weddings and has a blog at Happenstance Designs.  Now onto the beautiful backyard wedding that was built with much TLC.  

Rosemarie + Lawrence | Church of the Presentation | Wine and Roses | Stockton | Wedding

Every wedding has a funny story.  Well there's two for us in here.  We traveled up to Stockton for this wedding and were happily shooting, when lo and behold Ingrid's brother materializes out of the crowd to say hi to me.  His wife was there too and I was so confused for thirty seconds.  When I'm shooting my brain is in the zone and anything that gets me out of that throws a complete wrench into my highly excited mind.  It was definitely a pleasant surprise, because we both didn't know that we were going to be there.  I quickly ran over to Ingrid and told her that someone special is here for her.  I think they had fun watching Ingrid and I work the whole day.  They said that they can now report back to Ingrid's mom and tell her that we really do own a photography business and that I'm legitimately earning an income.  Now we can get married.  (no, we're not engaged yet!)

The bouquet toss is always a fun ritual that we like to shoot.  It's one of those moments where we don't know what is going to happen, but just hope that we get some good reactions to capture.  Well this time the girls were hungry.  So hungry that when the bouquet came flying towards them, they just tore it apart completely.  I thought it was one of the funniest and most desperate moments captured.  Gotta love all the action!  Thanks Rosemarie and Lawrence for the memories, you guys rock!