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

After hanging out at Pacific Oaks for a while, wedding cake was on everyone’s mind, especially the bride’s. It was time to hop into the limo and go back to the reception site, aka their hotel room. The wedding cake was a vegan delight from local vegan supplier Black China Bakery. As soon as the cake had been cut and shoved playfully into the appropriate mouths, Jill declared the photographers and the stylist to be officially off the clock.

Of course, we didn’t want to stop taking pictures. It’s hard to stop clicking when things are still happening! Jill was fairly strict about this though, so we don’t have as many photos to show from the last part of the day. She wanted to make sure we ate enough cake, and later, enough tasty vegan food at Malabar. The wedding dinner was enormous. We lost count of the courses, we were brought so many. At last we were able to relax and chat with Jill and Chase, and with Jill G. the stylist, who took out her own camera to show us photos featuring her incredible horror-film-style makeup skills. Have I said that Jill G. is awesome? If so, I must say it again. Jill G. is awesome.

As we ate ourselves into a coma, we finally heard the whole story of how Jill and Chase got together. This information is usually elicited long before the wedding, but what with one thing and another, we never got around to interrogating them about this. The tale was worth waiting for, and one befitting these two. It was full of secret longing, and fate, and explosions, and astroturf, and it could only end with the words happily ever after.

Thank you, Jill and Chase! Come back to Santa Cruz soon for another Malabar dinner, a walk in the woods, maybe a vegan donut or two…

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

Welcome to 2010! Happy New Year! (Yeah, I know it’s already February, but at least our first post of the year is in time for the Chinese New Year, right?) Things have been busy in Red Bat World. Photos have been processed, couples have been bonded in matrimony, various events have been thoroughly documented, terrifyingly large prints have been made for a bridal expo. Vast quantities of fun and work have occurred in approximately equal amounts.

Let’s go back to 2009, to the day that Jill and Chase got married. Some of you already know about this: Jill and Chase wanted a wedding with no guests, and they wanted it to be in Santa Cruz. That’s right, no guests at all! Just the officiant, the photographers, and the stylist. Before the wedding day, they drove from their home near Los Angeles several times to pick the perfect location, line up all the details, and of course, have a Red Bat engagement session. To read about (and see photos of) their engagement session, click here.

We knew that photographing a wedding with no guests would be an unusual experience. No crowd to infiltrate, no list of people to follow and try to capture without being obnoxious. What would this day be like, we wondered? What would our future be… No, wait, those are lyrics from The Sound of Music. Oops! (That happens to me sometimes.) Back to the subject at hand.

Of course it wasn’t really true that there were no guests, because WE were the guests, along with the highly talented stylist, Jill G. By this point in our relationship with Jill and Chase, we considered them to be good friends, so it felt quite natural to attend their wedding. In fact, the whole idea seemed totally normal by the time the day arrived, just part of the love story that is Jill and Chase together. It was a little bit like a wedding-themed photoshoot, but it was as serious as any other wedding. It was a day of solemn ceremonies, but it was also casual and full of jokes.

And because there were no guests, we were able to focus completely on the bride and groom and hundreds of details we wouldn’t have time to capture at a regular wedding.

This post has some of our favorite getting ready shots. For Chase, getting ready meant arriving at the venue before Jill and putting together a canopy he’d made especially for their ceremony. Chase is quite handy with a blowtorch. For Jill, getting ready meant achieving total perfection in hair and makeup, and boy was it worth it: there was absolutely no retouching required on her photos. Patrick followed Chase and watched him construct the canopy, while I hung around the two Jills (Jill the bride and Jill G. the stylist) and captured the process of making the bride even more beautiful than she usually is.

In case you’re wondering, Jill’s getting-ready, as well as the reception, happened at the Scotts Valley Hilton. The wedding itself took place at Pacific Oaks Vineyard Estate.

There are a lot of photos in this post, but if all has gone as I planned, they’ve all finished loading now that you’ve reached the end of the words. Enjoy, and make sure you look for photos of the Jill and Chase ceremony and reception in posts to come…

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.