First time to Newport Beach for a wedding. It was gorgeous, and so was the couple! We got to Newport after driving for two days down the west coast from Portland, OR. I shot a wedding there the week before, and we took the scenic route. We took the 101 for part of it to see the redwoods. And yes, they are as tall as your middle school textbook claimed. The trip was awesome! We rented a car for the drive (we had weddings Thursday and Friday in Utah, and so we flew out Saturday morning for the Portland wedding- CRAZINESS!), and the car we ended up getting sort-of-by-accident was this "premium car". Thomas made the rental car reservations, and the coupon code we found online gave us a "free upgrade." Ok, we were going to be driving 1100 miles, so he figured "premium" meant a nice comfy Cadillac or something. We ended up getting a Mercury Grand Marquis, and it was powder blue. Really... Total land yacht, and we felt like we should be about 80 years old driving that thing. It was comfy to drive though. Especially with that big bench front seat- I curled up and napped most of the way down... Good way to recover from three days of weddings.

**Note: I had heard of other photographers doing several weddings right in a row, even multiple on the same day. Figured I could do 3 in a row as I thought I was superwoman... but alas, I discovered otherwise. The weddings were AMAZING, but the recovery was not. Don't try this at home, kids.

Erin is a newscaster by profession, and she is such a friendly, outgoing, and bubbly person. She was so happy, just look at that perfect smile! She was beaming.

Evidently when they built the Newport Beach temple, they had to work with the city to make sure it kind of blended in with the rest of the landscape. So they ended up using this gorgeous stone that had almost a sandstone look to it. The architecture was also very Southern California- almost spanish mission-esque. I loved how unique it was!

After the luncheon, we were able to go over to the marina in Laguna Niguel and wheedle our way down onto the docks... Now, I have a confession to make. I'm a little bit obsessed with sailboats. We had a 2 man boat growing up and I actually cried when my dad sold it. Now as a photographer, I cannot imagine a better location than on a dock. I loved all the boats and the texture of the masts in the background. Two really nice guys let us use their boat for the photoshoot when they noticed we were taking pictures (People always give me stuff when I have a bride and groom following me. Something about weddings make even the tough guys sentimental). And as you can see, Erin and Cole's wedding day was "Just Dandy."

Talk about an amazing backyard!

Erin and Cole, thank you so much for letting me be part of your day! Everything was spectacular, and ya'll are amazing!

I'm originally from Austin, Texas, which I once thought to be a fairly big city. I live now in Lehi, Utah, which is definitely NOT a big city. Neither location really educated me on what "bad traffic" can really mean. I was actually pretty naive when it came to such things, and didn't really understand how horrendous a traffic situation can really be. NO LONGER!

We met up with Allison and Darron at the Los Angeles LDS Temple to shoot some bride and groom photos the day before their wedding (bridals/groomals/pre-wedding-vanity-shoot, call it whatever you like :), and when we finished, we headed on over to the Santa Monica Pier to finish the rest of the evening. It's only a hair over 5 miles from the Temple to the Pier, and I figured even with "bad" traffic we'd get there in about 30 minutes. ...About an hour and a half later we pull into the parking garage a block away from the Pier, and I am ready to pull out my hair.

This was fairly representative of the traffic situation during our trip down there. We fought with "Jeeves" our friendly GPS unit the whole way about whether or not we dared get onto a freeway while we were down there. It seemed like "rush hour" was actually from about 8am-11:30am and then again from 12:00pm-8pm.

Anyways, once we got to the Pier everything was great. Allison was completely gorgeous in her dress (even after close to two hours in the car getting there), and we ended up getting some really fun images. There were THOUSANDS of people around the Pier and the beach, which made Allison and Darron feel a little out of place in their wedding clothes, but they were awesome! Seriously, if I were on the other side of the camera I would have died. We even had an audience that spontaneously started cheering when they did their first kiss for the camera. Darron was so cute about the process- once he realized that we were going to have an audience for the remainder of the evening, he made the joke that he would just tell people that they were models just doing their job. So the whole time, he just said over and over under his breath "It's ok, I'm a model." It made for a fun running joke, and anytime we needed a genuine smile I just had to remind him to give his model face. "Ok, now BLUE STEEL!"