Category Archives: weddings

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A beautiful summer wedding with Laura and Adam

July 23, 2008 – 10:30 am

Laura and Adam had an absolutely gorgeous summer wedding last weekend. The weather was perfect, the sun was shining and everyone looked stunning! Here are some details that we couldn’t wait to post about!

As usual, Rene and I split up and we each spent some time with Laura and Adam as they got ready before the ceremony. Adam’s family and his groomsmen were with him and everyone enjoyed a pre-cermeony toast by Adam’s mom just before leaving for the church:

Rene also got some fabulous portraits of Adam, too. We both love this next one so we knew it was a “must” for the blog!

Meanwhile, back at Laura’s house, the girls were all getting ready as were Laura’s mom and dad. While in Laura’s room, just before she got dressed, I saw something that made me giggle out loud. For everyone who knows Laura, she’s probably the most organized person you’ll meet. So seeing this “To Do” list on her dresser should definitely come as no surprise at all:

We see all different kinds of unique dresses every single week and one of my favorite parts of the day is getting to see what dress we’ll get to photograph that day. I saw Laura’s dress and just got so excited - it’s STUNNING. Laura is so gorgeous and has the most perfect shape for her gown and so the result was just exquisite. Here, her mom was expertly tying up the corseted back:

Laura and Adam were able to pull a few strings and had their ceremony at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Worcester. It’s such a breathtaking and very grand cathedral and an extraordinary place to have a ceremony. After the ceremony, Laura and Adam said they’d like to have a couple of portraits of the two of them in the cathedral showing off it’s grandeur. It just so happened that as the ceremony ended and their guests exited the church, the most amazing ray of light fell through one of the large stained glass windows. (Rene and I get very excited about rays of light! :) ) So we all ran over to that very spot, took this portrait and within minutes, the ray of light had moved on. It was just gorgeous:

We then headed over the the Charter Oak Country Club for their reception and for a few more portraits of Laura and Adam and their wedding party. When we got together with Laura and Adam just before the wedding, Adam was brainstorming with us about some possible ideas for a very cool guy portrait that he could use in his “man room.” I love the end result!!

Laura and Adam just returned from their honeymoon and we’re so excited about getting started on their album together! Thank you so much for having so much fun with us - and we can’t wait to see you again in just a few weeks!

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A beautiful wedding honoring a Jewish heritage and lots of love

July 17, 2008 – 1:43 pm

We had the opportunity to photograph Jessie and Josh’s wedding recently at the beautiful Glen Magna Farms in Danvers. There were so many wonderful details and moments to photograph and Jessie and Josh are just a beautiful and warm couple. Josh has a wicked sense of humor and Jessie is his calming balance. Just like Rene and I! (I only wish I was as funny as Josh, though….) They’re so perfect for each and so obviously and completely in love and I still get chills when I think about some of the beautiful moments during their ceremony.

Jessie and Josh incorporated many Jewish orthodox traditions into their ceremony and it was just beautiful to be able to step back and document each moment for them. Before the actual ceremony, there is the signing of the ketubah. Here is their rabbi during that portion of the ceremony:

Jessie also had the honor of having her grandfather in attendance at their wedding as well. Her grandfather is in his 90s and it was very apparent that he is the patriarch of their family and is given so much well-deserved respect and love.

While the ketubah signing was taking place, the girls were upstairs in the estate getting ready with Jessie! Here are some details of Jessie’s dress and her flowers. What was especially wonderful about this is that Jessie is wearing the same dress her mom wore when she got married! It is absolutely stunning and looks so gorgeous on her. How special is that!

And something a little different with their rings. Josh’s ring is completely custom made and the center portion actually moves and spins! It is just stunning!

Up to this point, the men and the women have been kept separate. But when it was time for the bedeken - or veiling ceremony - Jessie and Josh would finally be able to see each other for the first time on their wedding day. While Jessie waits in one room, all of the men form a circle around Josh in another part of the house and then escort him in to see Jessie, while a melody is sung aloud by everyone present. It was truly an exciting and very special moment to witness.

Here the men are leading Josh into the room where Jessie waits for him. Josh is there on the left, trying to catch a first glimpse of Jessie.

As the melody being sung crescendos, the excitement builds and as you can see from Jessie’s reaction, it’s a wonderfully exciting and very emotional part of the ceremony:

And then the actual bedeken takes place:

Jessie and Josh then had beautiful ceremony in the perfectly manicured gardens on the property which included a dove release at the very end! Afterwards, we spent a little bit of time with them alone for their own portraits. We were walking around the house and just fell in love with the grand old library and especially how this beautiful light fell on them:

We just couldn’t get enough of Jessie and Josh and are just dying to share the rest of their images with them. They are on a VERY well deserved honeymoon - for an entire month! - in Thailand. It’s somewhere we are dying to visit ourselves so we’ve promised to hold their photos hostage until they come back and share all of photos from their trip with us! :) We hope you guys are having a wonderful time and we can’t wait to see you soon!

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Our very own celebrity couple!

July 9, 2008 – 9:24 am

That’s right…these guys have a permanent address right here on our blog and have the distinction of being the one couple who has made more appearances here than anyone else!

I think it would be a fair statement to say that we’ve been through a lot with Colleen and Todd. We’ve had two engagement sessions - a summer time session and then another winter session with them. We’ve been filmed together for a documentary that was being created about us after our 2007 Best of Boston award from Boston Magazine. (You can see the clip from that video here…) Oh but wait there’s more! Colleen booked a boudoir session with me (which I haven’t posted about because it was a surprise for Todd! But I will soon, I promise…) And now at long last there was nothing to do but wait on pins and needles for their wedding to arrive!

So as you can see the four of us have quite a history together. This is a couple that is truly close to our hearts and that we will stay in touch with for a long, long time. By the time their wedding day dawned last weekend, Rene and I felt almost as excited as if we were the ones getting married. Not surprisingly, we have a LOT of images to share from their wedding so here goes!

As usual, Rene and I started earlier in the day so we could each be with Colleen and Todd to get some great images before the ceremony. It always starts with the attire…

Colleen and I literally had about 2 minutes before we need to run out to the limo and meet the boys, but I couldn’t resist one portrait of her just before we left to meet Todd and Rene. Just using the beautiful natural light pouring in from the window in her hotel room.

And now you know why I completely fall in love with her every time I get to photograph her!

Colleen and Todd asked us to help them set up a meeting for them where they could see each other privately before the ceremony and spend a few quiet moments together. A few weeks before the wedding, the four of us took a Sunday afternoon and walked the campus of Wellesley College to try to find the perfect location. This beautiful huge archway partially covered in gorgeous vines was one of the last little spots that we saw before we left that day. And we all knew it was “the place” where it needed to happen. It was just so perfect, the lighting was beautiful here and had so many great elements to work with. Rene and Todd arrived first and just a few minutes later, Colleen and I found them. This next series of images describes all of the emotions of that special moment when they first saw each other much better than I ever could:

We then got to spend some alone time just with Colleen and Todd and have a session for just the two of them. After all of our previous sessions together, this was one of the things we were so excited about!

What you don’t know about that last image is that Colleen and Todd squeezed into this little tiny opening inside a stone archway just so we could get these images. Rene fell in love with the lighting inside and started talking about some of the great ideas he had for that spot. Colleen stepped up to the little tiny doorway, peeked all the way in at the dark dirty space that was there…looked back at Rene and then reached down with both arms to gather all of her dress and dived right in. MY GIRL! The results were stunning and we are so happy that they decided to go for it!

One thing I want to start doing here on the blog is show a little bit of what goes on “behind the scenes” of an image that we take. That way, you’ll be able to see what a location might look like (and I’ll be the first to admit that we sometimes use some really odd locations!) and then you’ll be able to see how the resulting image turned out. I know that sometimes if we’re in an alley or in some other unusual location, it might be hard to imagine what kind of image we could possibly get from it. But it’s actually always about the lighting. And posting these “behind the scenes” photos should help to get some insight into our crazy minds!

So here is an image that I took of Rene photographing Colleen and Todd. This is that little tiny space that I was telling you about. It was dark, dirty and not much room to move around. (Especially when you’re wearing a big gorgeous white dress!) There’s Rene on the left and you can see the videographer (David Bettencourt’s assistant, Jeff) there at the very bottom right corner:

Not the prettiest location, eh? But here is Rene’s resulting image - straight out of the camera:

After a beautiful ceremony we headed over to the beautiful Nashawtuc Country Club in Concord. And from the moment you walked into the ballroom, you could immediately see how much work Colleen and Todd put into every single detail of their wedding. The room was absolutely breathtaking with chocolate brown and soft pink accents. The room was completely transformed with soft uplights and everything was perfectly thought out - even down to the beautiful chocolate pintuck linens.

Near the end of the evening, we snuck outside for a few minutes with Colleen and Todd so that we could do a mini night session with them. So glad we did!

To say that this wedding was special for us is an understatement. We love Colleen and Todd to pieces and are so beyond thrilled that they’re finally officially husband and wife! Here’s to the start of a long relationship together and many more sessions to come!

Some details from their wedding:
Colleen’s pre-ceremony location: The Westin Hotel, Waltham-Boston
Pre-ceremony photo location: Wellesley College campus
Ceremony location: Wellesley Congregational Church
Reception location: Nashawtuc Country Club, Concord, MA
DJ: The Event Experience. Erik Buford is one of our absolute favorite DJs. We can say this from personal experience because Erik actually DJ’d our own wedding 9 years ago!! We loved him then and he was completely amazing again at Colleen and Todd’s wedding.
Videographer: The one and only David Bettencourt
Cake: The Icing on the Cake

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An intimate dinner party at Les Zygomates - to celebrate a wedding!

June 26, 2008 – 8:12 pm

If you’ve chatted with us at any point over the past week, then chances are good that you also heard about our fabulous wedding this past weekend. As hard as we tried, we just couldn’t stop talking about Christine and Richard. This is a couple that has it all going for them - they’re beautiful, fun, have the an amazing group of close knit friends and family and after ten years together they decided to exchange beautiful weddings vows that they each wrote for each other.

If you know anything about Christine and Richard, you’ll know that they are not going to do anything just because tradition dictates it to be so. They have an amazing sense of style and a fabulous independent streak. So every detail of their wedding was planned to perfectly reflect their personalities and we were beyond excited about being there with them!

Here are some of our favorites!

They celebrated their wedding ceremony in the beautiful Public Gardens in Boston under a perfectly blue sky (puffy white clouds and all!) And what made it even more special was that they asked their very close friend - and the person who introduced them to each other 10 years ago - to marry them. The scene was absolutely perfect.

One of my favorite moments was just as Christine, her sister (and matron of honor) and her close friend Jane were walking through the Public Gardens just before the start of the ceremony. We had literally just entered into the Public Gardens and it’s so hard to explain the excitement and anticipation that we were all feeling. We were literally seconds away from one of the happiest moments in their lives. And at that very exact moment, Christine turned back to look at me and *click*. I think this next image really describes all of those emotions perfectly:

After the ceremony, we got to spend a lot of time with Christine and Richard as they had their own portrait session in so many amazing locations including the Public Gardens, Chinatown and sometimes right in the middle of the street. We talked about their portraits having a dramatic, cinematic feel to it which suits their personalities perfectly and we had so much fun coming up with some unique ideas together! Here are some of our favorites:

Christine and Richard had scheduled enough time in between the ceremony and the reception so that even after visiting all of those different locations, we were still able to make it back for their cocktail hour and that they were able to mingle with all of their friends and family.

They had their reception at the coolest wine bar in the city, Les Zygomates. If you’ve never been here, you MUST go soon. It is undoubtedly one of the coolest spots in the city. The food is fabulous and the ambiance makes you feel as though you’re in a cozy little jazz bar in Paris. There’s even live jazz every evening (except Sundays) with no cover charge. Christine and Richard told us that they didn’t want their reception to feel like a formal event. Instead, they wanted their guests to feel as though they had been invited to a small private dinner at their home. And that was exactly how it felt! And everyone picked up on the vibe immediately as the entire evening was filled with so much laughter, mingling and fun. Here was the moment that Christine and Richard first entered the front door during their cocktail hour to a LOT of cheering:

We didn’t just have a great time with Christine and Richard, either. We decided to have some fun with some of their guests as well including “the smokers” that met at regular intervals just outside the front door.

That’s Richard’s dad right in the center! Everyone loved our idea for that photo and they really had a lot of fun making it all work. You guys were great!

Christine and Richard had mentioned to us a few week ago that they would love to be able to do some “night shots” since we were going to be in downtown Boston and in such a great wine bar. Once they said that, Rene and I couldn’t stop thinking about the possibilities. And by the time their wedding day arrived, we decided to stay until the end of the reception and steal Christine and Richard for another mini-session. These guys are so fabulous that we just couldn’t take no for an answer. But fortunately for us - they were just as excited as we were and here is a tiny peek at the results:

Thank you again so much, Christine and Richard…for being YOU!

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Sheela and Tony at the Peabody Essex Museum

June 25, 2008 – 1:37 pm

Get ready for lot of updates to the blog over the next couple of months - everything from weddings to portrait sessions and even more! This is one of our favorite times of the year. Which is probably exactly why Sheela and Tony picked a Saturday in June to get married! And after more than a year of planning, when Saturday finally dawned - there was no denying that it would be another absolutely perfect day for them.

Sheela and Tony planned a North Shore wedding with their ceremony in Gloucester and their reception at the beautiful Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. They scheduled a 3.5 hour gap between the end of their ceremony and the beginning of their cocktail hour so that they could really have fun with their portrait session and with their wedding party. They wanted to be able to go to a few different locations and get really creative and they also wanted to attend their cocktail hour, so scheduling that amount of time gave them the chance to do it all! So many of our couples this year have extended the time between their ceremony and reception for the same reason, and it’s been so much fun to take on the challenge and be able to leave our couples with some amazing portraits that they never would have been able to have otherwise!

So since we had so much time together, get ready for a lot of photos in this sneak peek from Sheela and Tony’s wedding! There are so many more that we wanted to share and I had the hardest time picking some out for the blog.

First let’s start at the adorable little chapel in Gloucester where they were married - just seconds after they officially became husband and wife and walked back up the aisle together to a cheering crowd:

Next, it was off to the Gloucester Harbor and Eastern Point with their FABULOUS wedding party.

The men:

After having some fun with their wedding party, everyone relaxed (and cooled off!) in the limo while Sheela and Tony enjoyed their own private session there on the beach. Sheela’s dad is originally from India and so to honor that side of her family, she had henna applied to her hands - it was so absolutely gorgeous:

And here’s the ever-handsome Tony:

Sheela’s dress was so incredibly beautiful. She had tried to describe it to me before the wedding, but that did it no justice. My jaw literally fell open when I saw her - she is just so stunning! (And Tony thinks so, too…):

From here we made our way over to the Peabody Essex Museum where we still had some time for a session with a completely different feel from the beach! We first stopped in to see the East India room completely dressed and ready for their reception. It was fabulous for Sheela and Tony to be able to take a few minutes and really soak it all in and see everything come together after all of these months of planning. One of my favorite little touches were this beautiful jars of jam that Sheela and her mom made together as favors for their guests. It’s her mom’s secret family recipe and they spent many long nights carefully preparing it for their guests:

And then we were off to make use of this gorgeous and incredibly unique museum. It was just SO much fun to be able to find some new and really creative ways to photograph Sheela and Tony among the fabulous exhibits:

There’s so much more! It was such an amazing evening and we just didn’t want to leave them. Sheela and Tony were so happy with all of their closest friends and family and we just couldn’t be any happier for them!

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Megan and Jeff - in front of our cameras again!

June 11, 2008 – 12:56 pm

Megan and Jeff are so much fun to photograph! And I get the impression that they might really have fun with it, too - they’ve been in front of our cameras three times in just the past year!

We first met them when Megan was a bridesmaid in Margaret and Tim’s stunning wedding last July. Then when Megan and Jeff asked us to photograph their own upcoming wedding we set up a date for their own engagement session and got to photograph them again all on their own. So needless to say, when their wedding day finally arrived, we all knew the kind of fun we were in for and we were all very excited about it!

Rene and I each spent some time with Megan and Jeff early in the afternoon and then we all met up for their beautiful ceremony at St. Columbkille Church in Brighton. Their reception was at the very cool and very urban Seaport World Trade Center in Boston. Their wedding party was a ton of fun and I’m sure none of us will forget the mad scramble while we were taking photos outside when the large bolts of lightning lit up the background. Fun times and definitely some great memories!

So Megan and Jeff are still away enjoying their very extended and very well deserved honeymoon, but we wanted to post some of our favorites from the wedding while we wait for their return to Boston!

One of my favorite moments just as the ceremony was starting when was when the two beautiful flowergirls (Megan’s nieces) received some last minute encouragement from their mom just before walking down the aisle…

And our favorite part of each wedding is the quiet time that we get to spend with each couple. This is when we really have fun. The rain began just as the cocktail hour was ending, so Megan, Jeff and Rene found shelter just under the front entrance at the World Trade Center and took advantage of some beautiful lighting all at the same time…

Later in the evening, Megan and Jeff wanted to sneak away with us for a few minutes again so we could have another mini-session with them after the sun had set. We are so happy that we did because these are some of our favorite images that really show off this gorgeous couple. Our goal was to find some unique elements at the hotel that may not normally be used for photographs so that we could give Megan and Jeff something a little different.

We found an outdoor balcony overlooking the city skyline and the entire balcony was lit with just a lantern-like lamp that was mounted to a wall. The rivets on the wall behind Jeff provided a cool texture and we used that single light to create some dramatic lighting. Then Jeff gave us his best Hollywood mystery man look and he looks absolutely fabulous…

We then headed inside to the very standard and not so interesting “photo room.” But it did have some great blank walls. So we turned all of the lights off, closed the doors and used some video light to create a stunning portrait of Megan:

It was truly a night that no one will ever forget! Megan and Jeff are one of those couples that will do anything for their family and friends and as a result have the incredible support of so many wonderful people. It was so special for us to be there with them!

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