Stephanie and Mike's Engagement Photos

I shot Stephanie & Mike's engagement photos a few weeks ago in Golden Gate Park. Here are a few of my favorites!







Stephanie and Mike are getting married at the Irish Rose Inn in Healdsburg this October. I'll be sure to post pictures from their wedding!

2 weeks!

Today marks the date of exactly two weeks until our wedding. A little crazy, a little overwhelming, but really exciting none the less. I picked up my dress yesterday and have been waiting for Eric to leave to take a picture of it. The surfing is supposed to be bad, so there goes my one chance! I'll have to make up an errand for him to run :)

Instead of dress pictures, here are some reception items I designed recently! We decided that the place settings needed a little more color, so these little guys will be on ribbons tied around the napkins on each plate. Originally there was only supposed to be one version, but, as usual, I got a little carried away and made more!






Since our main color is yellow, and we are having lemons in multiple places at the reception, I decided to incorporate that into the labels. I googled "lemon pictues" and then downloaded a perfect picture of a cut open lemon that I used for all of the designs. Even on the designs with the lilies, I left the peel of the lemon on the outside as a border. The lilies are the same brush I used for the invites, I just erased the part I didn't need and created a new photoshop brush of 1 simple lily! Easy, right?! Does anyone have a favorite?! I couldn't decide, and that's partly why we ended up with 4!

Vine Hill House, Sebastopol wedding: Amy & Nick's Wedding

I photographed Amy and Nick's wedding earlier this summer. It took place at Vine Hill House in Sebastopol, which is a beautiful outdoor location for smaller weddings. The whole wedding was full of personal touches, and great people. It was one of those weddings where you could tell everyone was really happy to be there, and the bride and groom were so excited to be getting married. Here are some shots from throughout the day.....




This is one of my favorite shots from the day. Nick looked at my assistant Betsy and I , and said "Are you guys happy? Cause we really, really are." I think you can tell by Amy's reaction!



Congrats to an adorable couple!

Wedding Invites

I've gotten a lot of compliments on my wedding invites, so I thought I'd post them with a little tutorial!

If you've ever been wedding invite shopping, you know it can be a little overwhelming, and the prices for invites are pretty over the top. After looking at a few stores and seeing that most invites seemed far to formal, flowery, and pricey for me, I decided to design my own. Here is what I came up with:




I knew letterpress was completely out of the budget, so in order to add a little something to the invites without jacking up the price, I added a pattern on the back. The process was surprisingly easy. I downloaded free photoshop brushes from www.brusheezy.com, then combined two brushes I really liked. A little drawing in photoshop to make the two images fit together, and voila, we have our own special little logo!




I hate how most wedding invites use a lot of paper. Outer envelope, inner envelope, reply envelope, directions, etc. We decided to save paper and costs by having the reply card be a postcard. I also fit two designs per page, which saved even more!



I repeated the same logo, and grass artwork throughout the invite suite to create consistency. I also used all the same colors and fonts. All pieces were printed on a thick, linen texture, white paper. All the fonts I downloaded for free from www.dafonts.com.

Lastly, I had them printed at the same place that printed my business cards for me, an adorable little stationary store in Petaluma called Paperwhite. They did a great job, had many paper options to choose from, and it ended up being less than half the cost of ordering a pre-made invite. I definitely recommend going the dyi route for invites!

Portrait Location Scout

Occasionally I like to roam around San Francisco with my camera looking for new places to have engagement or portrait sessions. There are so many great places in the city to have a photo shoot, and I love finding ones I haven't been to before. Today I found myself at Fort Point, and kind of fell in love with the place. The lighting is really dramatic and amazing, and the doors and walls all have really great texture. I'm photographing Kati and Jason's engagement photos later in the week, and they are letting me pick the location, can you guess where we will be going?!




The framing of the bridge would be perfect for a silhouette...............



I love this door, and am somehow going to incorporate it in the photo session! I'll post pictures from the engagement session next week, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't pretty excited to for this photo shoot!