Laugh, Cry, It’s All Good

Lexi and Andy’s nephew was so cute in his little red wagon processing down the aisle for their wedding!

Lots more pictures below.

If you’d like to see Lexi and Andy’s slide show, send the family an email or shoot me a message and I’ll send you the link. It’s a tear-jerker for sure, I’ll warn you. Above, my 2nd photographer, Matt Richman, covered the ceremony from the front sides. He did an excellent job, as always.

Lexi looked amazing in her beautiful dress! What a gorgeous bride she was! (Photo by Matt.)

Lexi’s brother and sisters performed a poem, “To Have and To Hold, a poem in four voices,” written primarily by Lexi’s sister, Sarah Schwimmer. I love the way it was read — sort of as a read/response, with excellent timing by the siblings. It was a beautiful poem, as heard on the slide show. Leave a comment if you’d like the words. I’ll check with Sarah and see if it’s ok to send it out.

The wedding ceremony was held at the Washington Crossing Unitarian Universalist Church in Titusville, NJ. Above, the Rev. Charles J. Stephens performed the ceremony with warmth, friendship and love.

Love those rings! (I took the photograph at the reception with the rings placed atop the knife that would later serve the wedding cake.)

A very hot wedding kiss!

Matt took this one just as the recessional began. Love it!

Matt took this one too as Lexi and Andy made their way out of the Sanctuary. What a great capture, Matt! Love this one!

During the service, somebody scratched “Getting” off the wagon so it would be ready for the recessional. I love it!

Doesn’t he look dashing in his tux? Love it!

What a sweetie! And he made just enough cooing noises during the ceremony so that we know he’s there, but no crying. I love the little snippets of his voice in the background during the poem.

Lexi and Andy went outside during the reception for a little quiet time.

I love this one.

I think this might be my favorite though.

But I like this one too.

Lexi and Andy love to sing and dance. I love that about them! Doesn’t Lexi look amazing? She has been working very hard to get in shape for her wedding day. Starting out with yoga, proper nutrition, stress management, she changed her basic lifestyle and then began working with Carlos, at 24 Hour Fitness in San Diego. She lost 20 pounds, and did it over a year and a half! She sent me a “before” picture, and the one above would be one of my choices for her “after” picture. I’m not sure if Lexi wanted me to put the “before” picture in the blog post, so I’ll wait to see if she greenlights that before I put it up.

I went to the rehearsal just to get a sense of the Sanctuary and snapped a few pictures to see how that massive white wall was going to work as a background. It turned out beautiful because the focus in all the pictures ends up being solely on the couple, and not on any decoration. I love the shot above. Andy’s sister, Becky, was the Best Woman. The most challenging thing about shooting there was the giant skylight directly above the pulpit. (Direct overhead light is not the most flattering for pictures usually, but in this case, it worked out fine!)

Lexi’s “something old” was over 3,000 years old! Wow!

I was with Lexi while she was with the girls getting ready. I love the shot above of her sharing photos of Andy when he was a baby. The girls had their hair done at the Metropolis Salon in the Princeton Shopping Center. Everyone’s hair looked amazing and the staff was so accommodating to open up early on a Sunday morning. (They also rescued me when my car battery died. Phew. Can’t thank you enough for lending me those jumper cables. New item added to my wedding list of mandatory items to have on hand: jumper cables.)

Matt was with Andy while he was getting ready with the groomsmen and his friends and family. We time-sync our cameras so that we can see what each party was doing at the same time. I loved the fact that Andy’s group was looking at a laptop screen at the same time as Lexi’s group. Andy wasn’t looking at adorable pictures of baby Lexi though. He was looking at YouTube videos of Christopher Walken’s impressions of Lady Gaga.

Lexi’s dress was a custom design. It was gorgeous! I loved the little flowers and vines in the design, but mostly, I loved how it fit her and looked so beautiful on her figure!

The seamstress, Nesrin Avci, was a GODSEND! First of all, Lexi’s dress fit perfectly and beautifully. Above, she and two of the bridesmaids are helping Lexi get into her dress, making last minute adjustments along the way.

Also, there was a huge problem with one of the bridesmaid’s dresses from David’s Bridal. It arrived with the zipper completely broken. If Nesrin hadn’t been there, Gwen would have had to wear some other dress; it was that bad. But Nesrin sewed her into the dress in a matter of minutes with the only thread she had with her — white — and then Lexi’s dad ran to the store and bought a royal blue Sharpie to color the thread. Thanks to Nesrin’s skill and talent, you couldn’t even tell there was a problem. Until the end of the night when Gwen literally had to be cut out of the dress. Yikes!

I love this shot of Lexi’s dad working on his reception toast speech in the basement.

Love this one that Matt took of Andy getting help with his tie.

LOVE this one, Matt! Nobody makes cufflinks and hands look as awesome as Matt does. And I love that there is just as much coverage of the men getting ready and the groom’s family as there is of the women and the bride’s family.

I thought it was cool that both Matt and I took pictures concentrating on feet at roughly the same time! (See next picture.)

Gotta love the Oreos on the floor. This picture cracks me up! Nice photojournalism, Matt!

Matt — this one looks like a rock band picture or something. I love it! Favorite parts: the fact that the groom is the only one standing, and his friend (also named Andy) in bare feet.

Lexi pointed out to me in an email message that the staff at The Element by Westin in Ewing/Hopewell did a great job. Knowing that I would be blogging about the various vendors she chose, she wrote that the hotel staff was, “AMAZINGLY helpful during our entire wedding weekend,” adding, “they try to be eco-friendly and I appreciate that!”

One of Lexi’s bridesmaids, Kat, did a great job on Lexi’s makeup. It was perfection, as if she had been made up by a professional photoshoot artist! Great job, Kat! Kat also did a nice job on the bridesmaids, touching up and giving advice for good makeup choices for photography. I can’t thank you enough, Kat. I literally had NO retouching to do on any bridal party pictures thanks to you!

Fave! Matt Richman, you ROCK!

This tree was planted in the backyard of Lexi’s house in memory of her beloved dog, Maggie. It’s a Forest Pansy Redbud (one of my favorite tree cultivars) and the heart-shaped leaf is the basis of my little “JWS” leaf logo. I drew the logo from a photograph I took of a redbud tree on the street where I live.

Fave! Lexi is gorgeous!

I love his Picasso tie.

Matt also did a great job capturing location images for me. The church has a very interesting architecture, that, if not photographed expertly, could come out looking a bit plain, but Matt used the elements of nature surrounding the church to make the photographs special for Lexi and Andy, who are both lovers of nature. Thanks again, Matt!

Doesn’t Lexi look gorgeous in this shot taken in her backyard? Special thanks to our photo assistant, my son Brad. He did a great job as my voice-activated light stand, along with many other tasks that day. (To include learning a valuable lesson about car batteries.)

Wow! Lexi, you really look stunning!

Love this shot of the flying birdseed. By the way, Lexi, yesterday (three weeks and several photoshoots after the wedding), I was still cleaning birdseed out of my camera bag. I’m sure you’re not surprised about that!

Love this shot of the couple checking out the rings in the limo! (Look at all the birdseed on the floor. Ha.)

Above, the beautiful table settings in the reception room at the Washington Crossing Inn. Matt took some nice detail shots of the room and place settings while I was upstairs in the beautiful bridal suite capturing images of the moms signing the marriage certificate.

Lexi told me that the Inn’s event coordinator, Cammy Castiello, and the serving staff were very helpful. “One guy even put my leftover red wine into a soup to-go container for me at the end of the night,” she said, “because he saw how sad I was that I never had a chance to finish my drink!”

I cried during the first dance because Lexi and Andy danced to the song I had chosen for their engagement slide show after spending the weekend with them in San Diego. That was so touching to me. In fact, I’m getting all teary-eyed as I write this paragraph. Im such a mush. I love how close I get to the families I shoot!

What a sweet couple they are!

The father/daughter dance and the mother/son dance happened at the same time, which was really sweet too.

Tough shooting the toasts with that mirror behind them — but it was so great to have Brad there as my assistant because we were both able to sit on the floor in between tables about 20 feet apart. Making eye contact, I could easily let Brad know whenever I wanted him to point the light at the ceiling when I sensed a “moment” coming on. (On-camera flash would have resulted in a much-too-direct light that would have looked weird in the mirror.)

The soft light really compliments the location too.

Lexi’s mom made an excellent impromptu speech about the fact that the wedding was on Memorial Day weekend. She talked about her father who died in a war and about a member of the family, a doctor who will be deployed to the Middle East soon. I thought her speech was perfect, since, as most of you know, Memorial Day is a very important holiday to me. The day after the wedding, I covered Memorial Day events in Metuchen and made a slide show from that. It’s been a very busy time for me lately.

Love the light in this shot!

Lexi and Andy met at Carleton College where they both received their undergraduate degrees. Above, Lexi wanted to try to get a picture with all the Carleton Alumni at the reception. Love the Frisbee, and the very special guest. Do you see him?

That’s a hint.

As a general rule, when I shoot engagement pictures, I tell couples they must hold hands or be within hand-holding distance at all times, but that they can’t kiss so that the first time we see pictures of the couple kissing is the ceremony kiss. In addition to making the ceremony kiss that much more special, it also gives me plenty of shots of the “almost kiss” which sometimes can be hotter than the actual thing. Ok, but not in this case. Woo! Love it!

Once the reception got going, Brad and I set up a photo booth beside the dance floor. Brad did a FABULOUS job on the photo booth pictures! Thanks, Brad! You can be my assistant any day! I LOVED having you there with me and it was so cool to see you taking the job so seriously and also having so much fun with the photo booth shots! I know that Lexi and Andy and their friends and family will love to see all those shots in their gallery and on their disk! Thank you!

I took a quick shot of the photo booth set up. In the background, Lexi’s wedding coordinator, Rachel Holland. She did a great job keeping things organized, answering our questions and managing all the day-of details so that Lexi could relax. Thanks Rachel!

I love this photo booth shot of Lexi’s mom and dad!

Here’s another of my fave photo booth shots. Brad did a great job bringing out the fun in people despite the odd wall we were using!

It was a really fun party! I loved the fact that I knew a lot of Lexi and Andy’s friends from my visit to San Diego.

Love this one of Andy and his mom!

But this is definitely one of my favorite photo booth shots! The DJ, Mark Klatskin, of Ultrax Disc Jockeys, did an excellent job. They were so much fun and the party was great! I LOVE this picture of you guys!

This one’s awesome too!

In our vendor review, Lexi wrote in an email message to me about how much she appreciated Mark’s services. In addition to providing select music and emcee services for the reception, he also provided special music for the cocktail hour and for the ceremony. Lexi wrote, “Our DJ, Mark, was amazing! He got EVERYONE on the dance floor and people had such a great time dancing! And the ceremony music was exactly how I imagined it.”

I wasn’t expecting the cake smashing. LOL.

Coming soon — a blog post about Lexi and Andy’s awesome guest book. I love all the fun and sweet things people wrote.

I love this picture! Thanks Brad!

Friend me on Facebook for more pictures! Lexi and Andy, I hope you love your slide show as much as I do! You guys were so much fun to be around and I will always cherish the memories of your beautiful wedding day. I know you will have a great life together.

Peace, my friends,

–jules