I love photographing weddings. It is an honor to be involved so intimately with a bride and groom on this most precious day. I invite myself to all of the events. I nudge my way into the brides dressing room and I get to know the names and smiles of all of the bridesmaids. It is like my sister or my best friend is getting married, but my only job is to photograph.

I love that I have the excuse to stare at people and examine in detail what is happening. I get to witness the tender moments between the bride and groom in their first few hours of marriage. I love that they trust me with thier memories.

This is the first wedding that I’ve shot since my own wedding and it made me miss my Mr. awesome much. It also made me a little jealous of Stephanie and Brian. My wedding was miraculous and it went be all too quickly. It is now like a sweet dream that I try to recall in detail, but can only remember the lingering sugar on my tongue. I remember my wedding day like I do my childhood: faded bits of moments puncuated by vivid sparks of images. These images are of course, the moments that my photographer captured.

How lucky I feel to be able to use my camera as a butterlfy net to capture those vivid sparks for Stephanie and Brian. You can see more of their wedding day at my Stephanie & Brian set on flickr.

much love all,

elle

I have edited myself halfway through 6 gigs of photos that I took last week in Logan, Ut at my dear friend Stephanie‘s wedding. This photo ended up on my camera when Stephanie insisted that I be in one of the photos. Someone in the crowd clicked this for me and I am so glad that they did. Stick around to see the best of the best- as always.

xo
elle

Girl pals Laura and Stephani both had this posted on their blog and I wanted to do it too, but thought, “what the heck is a meme?”. So I looked it up. Here is the wikipedia short definition:

A meme (pronounced /mi?m/)[1] consists of any idea or behavior that can pass from one person to another by learning or imitation. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, gestures, practices, fashions, habits, songs, and dances. Memes propagate themselves and can move through the cultural sociosphere in a manner similar to the contagious behavior of a virus.

So photo memes are photo “projects” that are sometimes collaborative, but always passed from one person to another like a virus. Rad. I already participate in lots of these through groups on flickr (I am involved with groups that take daily self portraits, portraits in public restroom mirrors, and photos of notes left on netflix envelopes), shutter sisters, and photo friday. In researching I also found PhotoMemes.org which compiles a hefty list of photo meme projects on the web. Even radder!

So now I can say, “yay for photo memes!”, and fully give myself to the idea. Hence, below you will find my photo for this meme, or rather two, since the rules weren’t clear where to pull the photos from, so the first photo is the sixth photo from the sixth folder on my flickr account, and the second photo is the same from my hard drive.

This was taken this summer at my brothers house in Spokane, WA during Hoopfest. We played basketball in the hot sun all morning and cooled off before the second game in his backyard. Joshua is filming Sammy, Katie, and Abraham playing in the pool. Such fun!

Garth actually took this one in the summer of 2007 in Riverside, CA. We were helping out at the wedding of our friends Tracy and Grant. I made the wedding cake and Garth and I were going to take photos. Things are never that simple. My camera was stolen (from off of my desk in my classroom on the last day of school) the day before, and someone in the wedding party forgot to bring the ribbon that was supposed to surround the tiers of the cake. So, at the last minute a friend of mine ran to the grocery store to get some of that cake frosting in tubes that I could pipe around the edges, and I used Garth’s camera to shoot the photos. Yikes. So this is me piping hideous blue frosting onto the cake that took me hours to make.

Happy Sunday everyone. I wore polka dots today.
xoxooxo

elle