The first thing that I saw when I walked into Melissa’s Mom’s house at the beginning of the wedding day was this picture of Melissa as the flower girl at her Uncle’s wedding.  There’s a bit more to the story, but more on that later……..

Melissa’s father passed away several years ago, and it was her uncle who walked her down the aisle.  Her uncle also filled in for her father in the traditional Father-Daughter first dance.  The little girl who once walked down the aisle in front of her uncle on his wedding day, was now walking down the aisle WITH her  uncle on her own wedding day.

I couldn’t help but laugh at this one….David Rothstein broke out his iPad and used it to cue the band for the next song in the set list

Hotel:

Flowers

Music

….So we were walking back up the fairway at the Silver Lakes Country Club in Orland Park, when Andrea’s maid-of-honor, Maggie noticed a tree with some really curvy branches that might look pretty cool in a picture.  So rather than try something with looking up at the couple, with the curvy tree limbs behind them, I wanted to use the tree limbs as part of the foreground of the picture.  Only problem I’m not that tall, and getting up high enough to allow the branches to frame the image required climbing up in the tree……

So I did my best squirrel impression and figured out a way to boost myself up into the tree, along with my camera.  Only problem was the tree trunk had several flowering branches which also had some pretty mean looking thorns on them.  I thought I had avoided them all on the way up, as well as on the way down, but it turns out one of them loosely lodged itself on my pants, only to make its presence felt when I sat down a little later on!  It would’ve felt a lot worse if the shot didn’t quite work out.

I love this last picture because while so many couples run a slideshow of pictures at their reception, it’s often very difficult to make a good picture of the couple watching the show.   Either the screen is too far away from the bride & groom, or you wind up just seeing the backs of their heads.  Luckily the room at Silver Lake Country Club has mirrors on several of the walls, so I was able to frame this one up with the screen in the foreground, and show Andrea and Andy watching the slideshow by using their reflection in the mirror.

There’s also an interesting story behind this image involving a photographer, a tree, and some thorns, but I’ll wait to fill everyone in on that one!

I kinda wondered after I took this picture who had the “honor” of sitting at the Detention labeled table….turns out it was Yesenia and David’s fellow teachers!

The funny thing about this picture is David doesn’t play a lick of piano (apparantly “chop-sticks” are even a challenge), but Yesenia is actually pretty good!

The photograph below from Christine and Greg’s wedding last year is a good example. Christine picked a very urban (grungy) area for her bridal party photographs, and even though everything came together pretty well, the picture that came straight out of the camera was missing something.  Looking at the photograph didn’t give me the same feeling that I had when we set it up on their wedding day.  Luckily 21st century wedding photography and photographers have a lot of digital tools at their disposal to maximize their vision and intent.

Take a look at the window above, the left side of the screen is the original picture, and the right side is the fully finished photograph. Use the links at the bottom to go back and forth between the original picture from the camera, and the fully finished photograph!

I cracked up when I saw this on their kitchen whiteboard….apparently there’s already been some discussion about when to start a family!

Both of Christie’s Pup’s were ready to roll, although Jack wasn’t so keen on being relegated to the upstairs once everyone was dressed

Every groom says “Oh I’m fine, not nervous at all, just excited and ready for the big day (and they’re all lying!)”  It was really refreshing that Charlie admitted “Yeah, I’m a bit freaked out right about now!”  Although you wouldn’t know it from this picture….looks pretty cool….

After their ceremony, we hopped across St. Charles’ Fox River and headed to Pottawatomie Park and the timing couldn’t have been better for their wedding and bridal pictures.  The cool thing about using Pottawatomie Park for wedding pictures is the large tower and pavilion make it possible to take pictures there even if the weather doesn’t cooperate.  Fortunately the weather more than cooperated for Christie and Charlies pictures, and we were lucky to get there just as the sun was setting (which by the way is the beautiful thing about fall weddings….as soon as the sun is gone…it’s time for the cocktail hour to start anyway.  So even though you might not have a ton of daylight for your pictures….you’ve got the best light of the day!)

This was awesome.  Neither Christie or Charlie are really into wedding cake (or cake in general I guess), so they decided to hire Cold Stone Creamery to provide an ice cream bar instead of serving wedding cake!  So there was no cutting of the cake, just a scooping of the first scoop!  Kinda cool when the first major decision of your marriage is what type of candy topping to put on your ice cream!……

…..mmmmm, come here caramel goodness….get down with your bad – self on that waffle bowl and vanilla ice cream!

They wanted a photograph with the ferris wheel in the background….luckly Olive Park provided this angle!

Rob’s best man absolutely skewered the groom with his toast/speech.  Rob, his family and his groomsmen are all from London, so “Whitey” felt the need to “translate” a lot of his speech for the American Yanks in attendance.  For those of you who weren’t there, here’s a quick re-cap:

Yanks = Americans
Gents = Mens Bathroom
Cupboard = Closet
Arse = Ass
Pissed = Drunk
“Did a Maths” = “Majored in Mathematics”