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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