Greetings from Las Vegas! I headed out earlier this week for the first leg of the Hot Mama Boudoir World Tour and for April & Jason’s wedding here. I normally have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Las Vegas – everything here is so very designed. So big. So over the top. But this trip has been really, really great. I like the Aria and would be happy to stay here again. It is conveniently located in the center of the Strip, so it has been pretty easy to get to everything.

I’ve had my iPhone out and about with me everywhere, so these are a few of my favorite snaps which I’ve shared on Instagram.

How can you beat this mountain view? I love seeing the mountains in Las Vegas!

These sculptures in the Cafe at the Aria fascinate me. I just love the glass, how solid they are yet how fluid they seem. Beautiful!

Wouldn’t it be super cool to use them in a boudoir session for posing with them? Heehee! I doubt the hotel would allow it, but it would make some really gorgeous photos!

I did the first of my boudoir sessions here at the hotel in one of their gorgeous and huge suites! As soon as I have the ok to share some of them, I will!

Later the night of the session, Elaine & I headed over to see Absinthe – a show that is almost impossible to describe without giving away how fabulous it is. Think a mix of an exotic cabaret show with a small circus (minus the animals!) in a small, intimate tent. We were in row H, and yet you can see how close were were to seeing everything. It was so cool! Definitely NOT family-friendly, this isn’t one you should take the kiddos to. We loved it though – it was a lot of fun!

After the show, Elaine & I headed over to the Bellagio for a quick bite, and of course had to take in the gardens. I loved the chrysanthemum bees with the giant daffodils!

April & Jason’s wedding is today and then I have another boudoir session tomorrow. After I leave here, it is back to Houston for a quick round of laundry and repacking my suitcase to leave 14 hours later to leave for the second leg of the Hot Mama Boudoir Tour – PARIS!!! (I keep joking that I’m seeing the “fake” Eiffel Tower here in Las Vegas, and the real one next week!)

I have session times still available for Paris on May 6th & 7th, and for London, England on May 9th & 10th. Let me know if you are interested in setting up a session while I’m there! You can Contact Me here!

I also have sessions available in Boston on May 22nd & 24th, and New York City on May 25th. Tour dates for New Orleans in June and San Francisco in August will be announced soon!

Two years ago I was attending a Houston wedding vendor luncheon where Sasha Souza was speaking. She mentioned a new non-profit that was being formed called Wish Upon a Wedding, with the purpose of granting wedding wishes for couples facing terminal illness or special circumstances. I thought it was such an amazing concept, I signed up to be a Wish Granter then & there, on my phone, during lunch. Houston didn’t even have a chapter yet.

One year ago I was contacted by the Houston Chapter of Wish Upon a Wedding and asked if I would be a Wish Granter for Alexis & Christian’s Wedding. OMG YES!!! I didn’t hesitate for even a second before I responded that I would be honored to be a part of making their wedding come true.

What an amazing day it was — and I am so grateful that Wish Upon a Wedding brought us all together, because they are some of the most wonderful people I’ve ever met. You may have seen them riding around town on their scooters, kissing whenever they come to a stop light. Cutest thing EVER! (You can see more of their engagement session here.)

Shortly after Alexis & Christian’s wedding, I saw that the Houston Chapter was looking for board members, and as I looked through the openings I knew which one was right for me. I signed up to be the Marketing Chair, and after being reviewed by the national and Houston level, I was offered & accepted the position in February of this year. Being on the inside, I’m more committed than ever to see this fabulous group go as far as possible!

If you or someone you know in Houston is facing a terminal illness or has a special circumstance which fits the criteria on the site, please apply for consideration of your wedding wish! There is an application process & it is then considered and reviewed. We need your help getting the word out that this exists for people! Wedding Wishes take all forms and sizes, and all of the details are on the Wish Upon a Wedding site.

If you’re a wedding vendor in the Houston area and would like to volunteer, there are opportunities to help with the various committees and board positions in the chapter and you are also welcome to apply to be a Wish Granter. We need you!

Last but not least, we have several fundraisers throughout the year to help defray costs for granting wishes, and this is where ALL of you come in! I’ll be announcing when all the details for the annual gala are ready, but this week you can join us for the Second Annual Tacky Wedding Pub Crawl – here in the Heights! Thursday, April 12th from 5:30-8:30pm we will be going from pub to pub on White Oak, dressed (or not) in our tacky wedding finest! It is going to be a GREAT time, and all the money goes to this amazing cause! Get your tickets HERE for $10/person if you book by 2pm on Thursday, and $20 at the door. Can’t WAIT to see you there!

I’ve been a huge fan of my Canon for years – starting with the Canon EOS 20D, then the 30D, and then the original 5D. In 2009 the 5D mkII came out, and I bought it shortly afterwards. Like so many others, the 5D mkII and I had a rocky relationship. There were only 9 focus points, and only one that really worked. But like all gear, you learn to use it to the best of your ability. For me, that meant taking a lot of photos to make sure that I had one with that tack-sharp focus that I so love. I worked with it, even when it frustrated me. To be honest, I even threatened to switch to Nikon – jealous of their ability to not have to battle with this focusing issue. The only problem? I have a lot of Canon lenses that I really love!

So like many others, I waited. When the new 5D mkIII was announced, I have to admit to being giddy with anticipation when I saw the specs of the new body! Canon finally heard our pleas for a better focusing system, and they came through with a total winner!

I was going to wait until this summer to get a new camera body, but when a friend of mine posted that he had ordered two and decided he only wanted to keep one of them, I decided to go for it – and I’m so happy I did! I picked it up on Wednesday, but had to wait until yesterday to go outside and play with it thanks to the rain. Fortunately, my cat Graham was willing to model while the rain was still coming down.

Indoors. No flash. Minimal color adjustment in Lightroom before posting it here – that is essentially straight out of the camera. (SOOC) – so amazing! Once the rain let up, I headed outside. The flowers were even more willing to model for me than the cat was!

This photo is zoomed in and cropped at 100% – as close as you can get – of the flower below on the left. *swoon* It makes my geeky gear heart so happy to have this camera!

And another 100% zoomed in view of that exact same photograph as above on the right. This crop is my favorite! Just look at that detail – and this wasn’t taken with my macro lens!

All photographs taken with the Canon 5D mkIII and the Canon 50mm f/1.2L lens.

Oh Canon, once again you make my heart sing. I feel as full of joy about this camera body as I did when I bought my very first Canon 20D years ago. It is finally a camera body worthy of the wonderful L series lenses that you make. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I can’t wait to use it at the wedding I’m photographing tonight at Rice!

April started off with Ashley & Jess’s wedding at Tiny Boxwoods. It was such a perfect venue for this gorgeous day! They chose the location because it was where they first met – Jess works there, and Ashley came in with her mother one day – and the rest is history! I love it when fate brings two wonderful people together like that! Thank you again to Meghan, one of my former clients, for referring Ashley to me – I enjoyed working with them so much!

Kandace & Clayton were married at Kemah Gardens, an absolutely charming Bed & Breakfast in Kemah, Texas – just south of Houston. Kandace is friends with two of my past brides, Kara & Melissa, so when they found out she was looking for a wedding photographer they sent her right to me! I love working with clients who are friends of past clients – it somehow just makes everything so much more fun, especially seeing the couples I’ve worked with over the years there at the wedding.

Kandace & Clayton’s whole day was just so full of love – you could sense how much they mean to their family & friends. Whenever Kandace was near, Clayton would just light up! It was beautiful!

This moment cracked me up – I had gone out of the bridal room to check in on things, and when I came back in I found Kandace and her brother peeking out the window to watch the bridesmaids going down the aisle. It was so cute!

I always love that moment when the groom first sees the bride walking down the aisle!

Nicole & Jack met because of the Heights when their realtor introduced them while Nicole was house hunting in the neighborhood. Meeting in the Heights, they wanted to incorporate our neighborhood in to their wedding as much as possible — we did their engagement session on 19th Street, and their wedding was at All Saints Catholic Church – my church now, only 3 blocks from my house! It is one of my favorite Catholic Churches in Houston, a historic church with the most beautiful interior! Their reception afterwards took place at the Intercontinental Hotel, and they had the coolest antique car ever take them from one venue to the other!

I wasn’t the only one taking a lot of photographs of Nicole & Jack with that amazing antique car!

The Intercontinental Hotel is so stunning, day or night! The grounds were so lovely, and the ballroom was beautiful!

The party was a good one, and the band, BackBeat had everyone dancing all night and eventually up on the stage with them! I love live music at a wedding.

A few weeks after Nicole & Jack’s wedding Mike & I closed on our 1920 Bungalow in the Heights, and we also moved my studio in to the new space on Heights Boulevard. 8 blocks from the house. I love working in the gorgeous old Victorian! Not only for meeting with my wedding clients, but for boudoir sessions as well. It is fabulous!

This was the quarter that everything changed. My dream of over 20 years of moving to the Heights in addition to having my studio here is a reality now. I’m so grateful to be living in the Heights now, and I love Houston more than ever now!

As a photographer, I’ve always been a graphic designer wannabe at heart. When I have my mind set on what I want something to look like, it is pretty hard to sway it. Knowing that, I tried really, really hard to stay open to Aimee’s creative brilliance while she worked on my logo for me. We thought we had a pretty good idea of what it was going to look like (including my signature in the new look), but Aimee asked if she could try out one more idea. She had seen the many logos I had pinned on my Logo Love board on Pinterest and knowing what the trend of my favorites were, she created something perfectly unique and EXACTLY what I wanted!

After almost 5 years, it was time for a change. The new logo just feels like it just fits and it makes me smile every time I look at it!

I’ll share more details in a few weeks of the rest of my marketing materials as they arrive! My business cards are already in for WPPI, the new client DVD labels will be ready soon, and … well, the rest is all going to be a surprise!

We loved that house. It was good to us. A nice quiet, peaceful neighborhood. Good schools. We had always wanted to live in the Heights; it just didn’t make sense at the time.

7 years later, we bought our house in the Heights after more years of dreaming about it (yay!) and put our first house on the market. Earlier this month, we got an offer and in a week, the house will become theirs instead of ours.

So the past two weeks have been busy, busy, busy! On top of going to New Orleans for Imaging USA, Salt Lake City for ALT Design Summit, we have now been packing up and clearing out everything that we didn’t move right away when we moved to the Heights last summer. We had a huge garage sale over the weekend and sold all the furniture we had left to stage the house. Now it is time to move or donate what remains.

The best of 2011 will continue soon! I can’t wait to share the rest of my favorites – but first, to sell the old house and have just one mortgage payment again!

I’ll be sharing more over on my personal blog, BigPinkCookie. For those of you that have been cheering us on and so encouraging through this time – THANK YOU!!! We couldn’t have done it without your support!

Here we go with January, February and March 2011! This quarter was filled with couples having destination weddings – in Houston! They almost all came to us – quite unusual! I still traveled a lot though, with Imaging USA in San Antonio, WPPI in Las Vegas – which included one of my destination weddings of 2011, and SXSW Interactive in Austin.

We started off 2011 with a Houston New Year’s Eve wedding ceremony & reception at the Houstonian Hotel. Cheryl & Dev live in Chicago, but returned to Houston for their colorful Indian + American wedding since Dev’s family lives here. Bonus? A nice escape from the Chicago winter! Their wedding was such a HUGE celebration, and with DJ Yogi-G spinning the music? It was quite possibly one of the best parties I’ve been to all year! His confetti canon that went off at midnight was so fabulous!

Next up was Lan & Herman’s Houston wedding. They live in Dallas now, but returned here for their wedding because Lan’s family is here. I have add that I adore weddings full of cultural traditions! They started their day off that morning with a tea ceremony at Lan’s parents’ house, where Elaine & I were immediately made to feel like part of the family as well.

After the tea ceremony, Lan and her sisters shared with us the story of how her parents met in VietNam, and how Lan’s father escaped Saigon after the fall of the city. It was so fascinating to me to hear history – things normally left to reading in books or on the news – first-hand.

We headed in to downtown for their wedding ceremony at the Houston Co-Cathedral of Sacred Heart where Lan changed into her wedding dress. Her father was so proud to be escorting her down the aisle!

My love of traditions and the meaning behind them probably came from growing up in the Catholic church. I adore a wedding mass and everything involved – so it was great that we had many Catholic weddings this year!

After the ceremony was over and we took some portraits around the Co-Cathedral, we headed to the Omni Hotel in Houston for more portraits followed by their reception which lasted well into the night!

Kelly & Sean planned their elopement around my arrival in Las Vegas for WPPI. Talk about making me feel special! I got to have a hand in helping to plan this one! Kelly is one of my closest friends in addition to being one of my associate photographers, and she & Sean decided to do something a little unconventional. After some brainstorming, we set up a Flash Flashmob wedding on the Las Vegas strip in front of the Bellagio Hotel! With 15 photographers or so as their witnesses (we were all there for WPPI), we met an officiant there in front of the world-famous Bellagio fountains where he performed a 2 minute and 12 second long ceremony! That has to be a record for the shortest wedding ceremony I’ve ever photographed! It was so much fun – and we gathered quite the crowd as people walking by stopped to watch it too!

Seconds into the ceremony, and already a crowd was gathering, cell phones out, snapping away right along with all the wedding pros! (That is Luis Godinez there on the right, Dustin Izatt in the middle, and Corey Ann just to the left of him.)

Kelly was super excited to put on Sean’s ring – her look of joy just cracked me up!

After the kiss, the crowd applauded! It was so awesome. Love makes people so happy. We took some time to take some photos with the next fountain show at the Bellagio and then headed back to our waiting limo, where Kelly & Sean made some new friends along the way!

It was wonderful spending the day with Lauren & Isaiah’s families — I photographed Lauren’s cousin’s Kelly’s marriage to Ted in October 2009 at Holy Rosary, and Lauren’s sister Tiffany’s marriage to Romeo on New Year’s Eve 2009, so it makes the day so fun when you already know all the parents, aunts & uncles there! (I was told that I’ve been officially made part of the family now – I’ll take that! They are the best!) Another Catholic Mass wedding, this time at Christ the Good Shepherd Catholic Church, with the reception afterwards at The Woodlands Resort.

This moment, completely unplanned, not set up or anything else, might be one of my favorites of the year. If I had to pick 10 photos only (which would be torture for me because I love so many), this would definitely make it. I can just feel the love & emotion every time I look at it.

Kate had contacted me months before their wedding, but when their wedding date changed due to a family member’s illness, I was so sad to learn that it fell on the same day as Lauren & Isaiah’s wedding. Since I was not available, they booked my associate photographer Kelly, and she did a wonderful job of documenting the day! (I still got to have all the fun of our engagement session beforehand!) Here are just a few of the ones that Kelly took of their wedding commitment ceremony & reception at Bethel United Church of Christ that I love!

The last wedding of the first quarter of 2011 was Michelle & Robert’s wonderful affair at the Sweetwater Country Club in Sugarland, and it was one where they pulled out all the stops! Planned by Pam of For Your Memories, the day was smooth as could be, and so much fun! Elaine & I could just sense the love surrounding the two of them all day, from their parents, their families and their friends. Quite the celebration! To top it all off, the decorations and flowers by Darryl & Co. were so gorgeous!

With having photographed over 100 weddings in Houston alone, I am still surprised that it took me this long to photograph one where the officiant was Minister Brian Engle, the same person that married my husband Mike & I back in 2004 in Galveston! It was a great surprise to see him there, and he did a fantastic job!

Michelle & Robert also had a multicultural ceremony – a second one immediately followed the first, full of beautiful chanting. They used the same chairs that Michelle’s parents used when they were married years ago.

After the ceremonies, they ate, drank, laughed & danced the night away!

It was so fun putting this post together and remembering the first quarter of 2011, I can’t WAIT to share more of my photographs from throughout the year! Check back soon for more!

Newly engaged and interested in having me be your wedding photographer? I would LOVE to work with you! Contact me here!

What is the reveal? We take the groom off to a photogenic location, have him face away from the path, and then the bride walks up to him and he turns around to see her for the first time! I know, some people worry that it takes all the magic away from seeing her walk down the aisle to him – but it really doesn’t. Instead it gives them a chance to have some private alone time, an opportunity for him to tell her how gorgeous she looks, for the nerves to settle down. I never pressure people in to doing it (my husband didn’t see me before our wedding), but I have to confess that I love it when they do.

Doing a reveal then meant that we had more time for portraits before the ceremony as well!

Since the wedding was in Bermuda, which is part of the United Kingdom, EricaLynn, Stephen, and their witnesses all signed the registry and the marriage certificate – just like Ann & Karl’s destination wedding in Bristol, England.

Click here to view part 1 (Bermuda & the Rehearsal Cocktail Reception), and click here to view part 2 (the beach and getting ready) of EricaLynn & Stephen’s Bermuda Destination Wedding photographs! I can’t wait to share more from the reception!

(Side note: if you read my post on my personal blog about the lessons I learned while almost drowning, the rock that we were swimming with our snorkel gear out to the day after the wedding is just to the right of this frame.)

Kelly went down to the beach to photograph it for me while I was with EricaLynn & her bridesmaids getting ready at the hotel spa. Talk about a pampering place! These ladies took such great care of us!

Then we all headed upstairs so that EricaLynn could have her makeup done and get into her wedding dress! I loved her dress, her shoes, and all the details!

Meanwhile, Kelly was with Stephen & the groomsmen as they were getting ready. It is obvious that things are always a little bit different in the guy’s room!

Be sure to check out the first part of EricaLynn & Stephen’s Bermuda Destination Wedding. Next up, the reveal and the ceremony!

To start this off – here are some photos of the island, the plants & the hotel – all so lovely!

On Friday night, the night before the wedding, after a rehearsal on the Lawn where the wedding was going to take place on Saturday, we all headed up to the patio where we had a private cocktail hour. It was so fabulous! The staff took such amazing care of us. I really can’t say enough great things about the Fairmont Southampton!

A cocktail hour or other activity like this is so wonderful at a destination wedding. Sure, a lot of your guests probably already know each other – but this was a wonderful way to get to meet everyone else. As destination weddings are more intimate by their nature, it makes the rest of the weekend more fun as everyone gets to hang out together, see each other around the hotel, and things like that. Plus it gives the couple a chance to catch up with everyone as well!

Stephen walked up to the bar & ordered a Dark & Stormy, a Bermuda specialty drink made with local rum & Ginger Beer. The bartender asked him if he preferred it more dark, or more stormy. Stephen wasn’t sure what he meant, so the bartender demonstrated. More stormy? More Ginger Beer. More dark? More rum. I’ll let you guess which one Stephen picked!

I loved that some of Stephen & EricaLynn’s guests really got into the Bermuda spirit with the dress socks & shorts! (I don’t think it had anything to do with the rum…)

It was so very awesome getting to meet EricaLynn & Stephen in person at last! I can’t wait to share their wedding day with you!

You can check out EricaLynn’s 5 Star Review (whoo hoo!!!) of working with us here.