Cassie and Shaun’s wedding was featured on Once Wed today. Go there for more details.

In a place that is archaic, exceptionally isolated, surrounded by 130,000 people living under plastic tarpaulins, no running water, no electricity, no food, no shops, no money…nothing….  In a place absent of all life pleasures, I found romance.

I found a man who I would want to spend the rest of my life with.

It was the 1^st of February 2007 …Darfur, Sudan.  The largest refugee camp in the world.

There were 20 expatriate humanitarians living there.  I remember an incident happened in camp where many people were injured and laying on the ground.  We all worked so hard to assist these people throughout the darkness with no light and no water.

I turned around and Gerald was standing there. From the darkness where he had stood for hours observing the carnage, he stepped forward holding a box of Belgium Chocolates.  He wanted to share them with me. We had spoken briefly prior to this of our mutual love of chocolate, such a rare and precious thing in a place like this.

But right there, a lifetime away from the rest of the world, stood a Belgian man oozing of humbleness.

For me the rest was history.

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All images edited with VSCO FILM.

music credit: Matt Corby – Big Eyes (iTunes)

My fiance, Rachel, has urged me that ”Sometimes you need to just throw it into the universe and see what comes back” – and now here I am writing to you.

Photography is so interwoven into the fabric of our relationship as the camera is almost always by her side. We are adamant about telling the stories of others and naturally we have been searching long and hard for someone to tell the story of our wedding.

Our wedding is August 13th, 2011. It will be a humble celebration on a small beach in Rye, New Hampshire. There will be a full moon, pie, and good company.
…
It is the stories your photos tell that move me so much. Our wedding is a story we hope to share till the end of our days and perhaps beyond that. I sincerely hope that you will be the one to help us tell it.

That’s part of the email Jeff sent me last year. I went straight to Jac and told her, “I’m doing this”. I’m very much guided by gut feeling and there was something between the lines in Jeff’s email that spoke to me. No matter their budget, I wanted to find a way to shoot their wedding. It was always meant to be, but there have been hickups. A couple of months before the wedding Rachel emailed me in desperation, there was a chance they wouldn’t be able to leave Korea where they both were working as English teachers.

Luckily it all worked out and I ended up traveling from Brisbane, to LA, to San Fransisco and then on to Boston. I stayed with Jeff’s parents, something I’ve never done with any couple before and yet it never felt strange. Everyone welcomed me with open arms and I was part of the family straight away. I didn’t know what to expect of their wedding, but I knew I had met some truly wonderful people. I wanted nothing more than capture their story.

Make them happy.

Make myself proud.

To help me with that I brought along Nirav Patel, a truly amazing photographer. I think we both knew we were on to something special. The week before the wedding I had spoken at a workshop in San Fransisco about what I do and Nirav was one of the attendees. Trying to explain what drives me and what I want to express with what I do is sometimes hard to put into words. But after this wedding it’s all become clearer again.

Thank you, Nirav.

Thank you, Jeff and Rachel,

This is what drives me.

This is what I want to do.

Oh, the seagull. All day we had this seagull circling us. During the ceremony he was sitting on the rock wall next to the wedding party and when I was shooting my portraits he was looking down from the sky. After I shot the photo of Jeff and Rachel between the two leaning trees, I showed it to her and Rachel burst into tears.

She quietly told me that her grandfather had promised her he would always look after her.

- When I die, I will come back as a seagull, don’t you worry, he said.

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Today’s wedding wasn’t sent to any wedding blogs. A “not enough details” reply would have been a slap in the face and an insult to everything I want my wedding photography to stand for.

music credit: Bon Iver – Holocene (iTunes)

Love.

I like it when two genuinely good and beautiful people get married. When everything seems chaotic and things don’t happen the way they should, we peel off the layers of what a wedding is, and the fundamentals become even more apparent.

Love.

This was my first out of  eight overseas weddings in a row and Mitra and Fabio gave me a reminder of what it is I do. I rediscovered Italy, fell in love with the food, the people and the land, always celebrating the good and simple things in life. I also fell in love with Mitra and Fabio – a fiery Finnish Swedish girl and a soft-spoken Italian boy.

Amore.

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Mitra & Fabio’s wedding was recently featured on Weddingchicks. Find out more details here.

music credit: Emma Louise – 1000 Sundowns (iTunes)

Today’s wedding is also featured on OnceWed. Go here for the story and more details.

Music: Ben Howard – Old Pine (iTunes)

Today’s wedding is featured on Polka Dot Bride. Go there for even more images and all the details.

Song credit: My Only Swerving – El Ten Eleven (iTunes)

This wedding is also featured on Rock n Roll Bride today. Head over there for more details.