This post is Part 3 of a 4-part series. Read Part 1 – Read Part 2 – Read Part 3 – Read Part 4

Pacific Oaks Vineyard Estate is an ideal location for weddings. You really have to see it to understand. You’d also have to meet Judy, the owner, who is very sweet and easy to work with. She is at least half of what makes the location so ideal. Her husband is a Southerner (like me, he is from South Carolina) and the property is a blend of California natural beauty and Southern architectural charm.

There’s a vineyard, of course, that slopes down a hill to catch the light of the setting sun in quite a romantic way. It’s a real functioning vineyard with a small winery attached to it; at our initial tour of the place, Judy gave us each a sample bottle of her wine. (I drank it with my sister Esther later that evening. It was delicious.) Behind the main house is a ceremony garden with a lush green lawn, and in front of it, huge oak trees and redwood benches. The two large decks are ideal for gathering people and staging events like cake-cutting, bouquet-tossing, and the like. A cheerfully yellow guest room is provided for brides to use in getting ready, mere steps away from the entrance to the ceremony garden. The property is immaculately kept and lovingly tended, and everything is laid out to make the logistics of a wedding day simpler and smoother.

The interior space is not available for weddings, but we got to see it when we scoped out the location. That pool house is amazing! I must say it would be pretty great to get married in that pool. I’d make all the guests take their places in rows in the shallow end, and I’d float down the aisle to the deep end on an inflatable giraffe. We’d make use of the great acoustics in that room by shouting our vows at top volume. Somebody (the aforementioned very talented musician sister Esther?) would cannonball into the pool and then play love songs on the panflute. It would be magical.

But this isn’t about me and my fictional love story, it’s about Jill and Chase and their very real one. They timed their ceremony perfectly. The golden hour was almost upon us when the ceremony ended and we started walking around taking portraits. At Pacific Oaks there are lots of intimate little nooks, great for posing and even better for kissing. We encouraged Jill and Chase to take full advantage of this.

We were pleasantly surprised to encounter some friendly young chickens in the vineyard. Chickens again! One of our favorite wedding shots of all time involves chickens; you can see it in this earlier post. These chickens must be treated well and given everything a chicken could ask for in this life. They followed us around and seemed to want us to pick them up. One of them did try to steal Jill’s ring, but who could blame the chicken? It’s a nice ring!

This post is part 3 of a 3-part series. Read part 1 – Read part 2 - Read part 3

This fabulous couple’s wedding reception was held at 515 in Santa Cruz. Talk about a challenge for these photographers! It was dark in there. I couldn’t have gotten the shots I did without the Lightscoop, a small, inexpensive piece of equipment that made it possible to shoot in those dim rooms without the awful results that happen with forward-facing flash.

The newlyweds treated us to an hauntingly sweet duet, with Peter playing the guitar and both of them singing. They claimed that this duet would replace their first dance, but then they gave us a sort of first dance anyway, and everyone was utterly charmed by them for the hundredth time that day. Here are 32 (!!) photos of the first evening of their married lives.

As a special bonus, I’ve included another behind-the-scenes Red Bat shot, about halfway down in this post. It’s Patrick, helping to test the lighting in the area where we expected the first dance to be. By dancing with an invisible partner. Because at Red Bat Photography, we know how to use our imaginations.

Hooray for Crystal and Peter!!

This post is part 1 of a 3-part series. Read part 1 – Read part 2 - Read part 3

Remember the foreshadowing I mentioned in this post?

At last, you get to find out what happened. What happened was, Crystal and Peter got married! Are you surprised? Did you already guess the secret plot twist? Was the fact that we are wedding photographers give away the ending?

Before we start with happily ever after, a warning: there are 24 photos in this post. Yeah, I know, that’s a lot for one post. And it’s only Part 1. But I love so many of the photos that it was hard to pare it down to just 24. Never fear, I have taken steps to ensure that they will load quickly, by optimizing the heck out of them.

Part 1 shows the bride and groom and their families getting ready. The perspective switches back and forth between the locations of the bride and the groom. Crystal got ready at her parents’ house, and Peter got ready at a beach house. Having two photographers allowed us to put together quite a complete narrative of the day (what you’re getting here is only a tiny slice of that narrative).

This was a highly creative, relaxed and friendly group; everyone who participated was a musician or artist or something of that nature. The awesome felted birds were made by Crystal’s mom. The piano duet features Crystal and her dad. Crystal herself did something I’ve never seen a bride do before: she put makeup on other people. They were all so easy to photograph and to be with that it hardly even felt like work.

The ceremony took place at the UCSC Arboretum, so I had the pleasure of following the bride and flower girl as they sneaked through the back trails to get to the ceremony site without being seen by any guests. Any wedding that involves sneaking through the woods is going to be a great one.

Regular readers know of my love of cellphone pics. (To see cellphone pics from previous months, click here.) The gallery below has 60 photos from my phone taken during June and July.

Alas, I have sad tidings: around the beginning of July, I dropped my phone (again). Suddenly, the camera could only see life from a psychedelic perspective. Now my cellphone photos look like this:

No, they don’t all look like photos of Caffe Pergolesi on a Saturday night. But they do look like the strangest dream I’ve ever had about ordinary, everyday stuff. They show what the world might look like if my soul was suddenly trapped in the body of some other species- possibly a species nobody knows about because it’s invisible. Sure, these photos are kind of interesting, but after just a few I find myself feeling queasy and uncertain about my grip on reality. And I simply cannot lose my grip on reality, not during WEDDING SEASON.

You can see a few more of these trippy photos at the end of the show below.

The bright side of all this is that I now have one more reason to buy the phone Patrick uses, the one he described in this post. But first there are a few lenses I want to acquire. As soon as I can fully justify a new phone purchase, cellphone pics posts will begin anew! Until then, what you see here will have to suffice.

So long, Samsung t439 camera, you fragile beauty…

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