the search for a new photographer

due to the craziness of the move and the lack of internet i have had for over a month, i lost out on my vancouver photographer! but i still adore her photos so here's an array of my favorites, and a little something to the right to show how great her low light photos can be without a flash totally flattening out the image. here are some great shots from melia at lucida photography. i adore candids:


i had been so against photoshop, coming from a film background, developing my own negs and prints since i was 10. i think it stemmed from an instructor that had disapproved of cropping my images when i developed my prints, saying all the cropping should be done from behind the camera. but these effects create such a great sense of movement into the image:


her love of industrial settings!


and composition that i adore:

ponies! mustaches, fedoras, oh my

i'm attempting to collect "shabby chic" (ie white wood) furniture for my new bedroom in the new house that include an armoire and a highboy dresser...possibly a vanity, though it feels less functional and too frivolous. andrew and i stumbled upon an antique "village" in bothell, WA (30 seconds from the bartell's in canyon park) that had that coombs, BC feel. it's actually where the princess bride wedding shop is, as i discovered, so i'll have to book an appointment sometime. they had a pony carousel that i got so excited about, but we'd left the camera in the car and it was too much of a dreary wet day to go back and fetch it. i bought a great new vintage hat in the last shop while andrew got pooped out and went back to the car to listen to some tunes. four hours later we were at my parents, and i whipped out the camera do show my dad the big screen tv we saw at costco, and lo and behold my favorite pony was on the camera! it took me a long 10 seconds to figure out how it got there, and then i realized he ran out in the rain to take the pictures just for me as a sweet surprise.

here are some photos of more of my vintage hats, as modeled by BM's vanessa and jenn, purchased in large quanities by me at a flea market in vancouver a while back with vanessa. oh vintage accessories, how i love thee. so back to the photobooth idea....mixed with a wedding favor idea that one of sean flanigan's client's had - stick on mustaches for every guest - it would be neat to leave fedoras and charlie chaplain style hats and hair accessories for the ladies with an elegant mirror outside the photobooth. speaking of which i haven't booked one yet so there's another thing to add to my busy schedule. i haven't touched anything wedding related in a while (melia if you're reading this, i'm not flaking out, i've been super busy and i'm still sending you my photo contract/cheque), people at work say andrew seems more excited about it than me right now. haha!

i'd love to have a not-fine netted veil - very 1950'seqsue. and for all the ladies involved to have flowers (and subtle plumey feathers?) in their hair. moms, sisters, etc etc. none of this tacky corsage business. here are some random images from the seattle bride magazine. speaking of which i've got a lot more magazine images to post - one issue had a great cake section. i have a lot that i haven't blogged about because craigslist is eating up all my spare time.

flowers at costco

at first i was depressed about having a wedding in canada because i couldn't get wholesale flowers shipped overnight to my doorstep, and i had no hope of taking advantage of costco's flowers. not so! the new costco in downtown vancouver caters to yaletown.....in addition to men's suits, they offer bridal flower packages! and not only that, but i had entertained the idea of walking out to a small shoppe on west broadway and picking out four random colorful bouquets in the $15 range, but looks like i can do it at costco, too. these are all photographs of the flowers that were in season around august 16, 2007 so it's a good indication of what would be available for the wedding. the only thing is these $15 bouquets are meant for vases, can we wrap some ribbon around them and pull off bouquets??

david's bridal, round two

i had a day off to look for furniture but somehow wound up at a david's bridal in tukwila, wa. i'd never really had a good look at their bridesmaid dresses before but saw this new number in the window and was quite taken by it (it's got a nice neckline like that bridal gown i tried on the other week, and the back is classy and conservative). it's in that sheeny-shiny taffetta that i had sworn off, but it's got a nice a-line skirt that gives me a figure in a way that these chiffon dresses entirely do not. and the prices are unbelievable - $115 for this one, and $130 for the others. they remind me of the bridesmaidy dresses we tried on at frocks in kitsilano, but without the $400 pricetags. in a black or espresso brown, would you wear this dress again?



if we didn't go matchy matchy (which i'm really leaning away from lately), we could do two dress styles - either all taffetta or all chiffon like these two pairs above and below.



the chiffon ones look so great on the models, but so awful on me (even though i can pull off an hour glass figure in bridal gowns!), not to mention that the tea-length is so incredibly long on me that i look like a hobbit.

TIARA when are you going to come visit me? how many shopping trips to seattle have you taken since you found out how close i live to the city?? Vanessa I need your help moving. Jenn....come down for a relaxing weekend, or at least a new environment to study in or write in for a weekend.

i was featured in the province newspaper

so i was featured in this last sunday's province newspaper of vancouver. (note to bridesmaid: tiara - did you stumble across it or did you anticipate it by my msn name?) here is the online link to the article. the reporter stumbled across my blog on a search for vancouver brides that have trashed the dress, and just as i did, she found no one. somehow i come off sounding like a total nut job in the article, because words like "Friday night haunt" strung together with "East Hastings" makes me sound like i've overcome my days as a prostitute, and "wallowing" makes me sound like some sort of swine. that being said it's still pretty cool to be in the paper for those last few paragraphs in the article. things were misquoted and taken out of context, and i had emailed her something that jenn, the MOH had elucidated and somehow they were taken as my words. Here's what jenn had to say:

"Trashing the dress is two fold for me - not that I'm going to do it but if were: one, it's that no one else is going to wear it, and two for us at least - a white dress is no longer necessary....a destruction of what was for the future you have. Why carry all that around with you? Sure you had a wedding but it's now a marriage, it should no longer be defined by that moment in time, which is why the divorce rate is so high women want to carry all the princess shit forward from that day, and it doesn't work regardless of what the dress looked like or cost - this is now a marriage, a life long commitment - and no dress is going to hold it together if you don't work at it. So get rid of the dead weight and have some fun right out of the gate."

the reporter kept looking for my motivation and ideology behind the concept of trashing the dress. did i "think it was anti-wedding." i'd never thought of it in these terms. to me it's just the aesthetic. sure i could try and say that it's art and attach some sort of lofty, thought out meaning to process. but even most of my personal artwork is just that, art. no politically charged statements. no social comment.

in the beginning andrew wanted to have nothing to do with this trash the dress session - now, when i brought up the questions the reporter had asked me, he laughed and said - it's just a fun thing to do and it'll make great memories.

great memories, yes, that....and i'll have something like a super cool music video of myself!

trash the dress

we spent the long weekend on the island in nanaimo with friends, shelly and jordan. see photo montage above. jordan and i brainstormed some fantastic location ideas for the trash the dress, which included burns bog, among many others that i currently can't remember.

the best man worked with ducks unlimited this summer, wading waist-deep in muddy marshlands breaking down beaver dams. some of his photos revealed landscapes that looked very lord of the rings, frodo-baggins-scurries-through-the-swamp. unable to remember the names of the sites he went to in south surrey, chilliwack and wherever else, a quick search at flickr revealed some strange shanty town, finn slough. it's not on the outskirts of hope, aldergrove, or even lytton, bc, but in richmond, off of No. 3 no less.

these gorgeous photos courtesy of kk at flickr.

a bridal store has relocated to kitsilano called bride to be on broadway near macdonald. despite the fact that the photos on the website don't necessarily reflect exactly what they have in stock, what they do offer is each dress in several different sizes. i was actually able to try some dresses on that were a size 4 (compared to the size 10-12 i usually get clamped into). here are two casablanca dresses that were pretty decent, dress #1814 (spring2006!) for $1300 CA and #1881 (fall2007) for $1260 CA. not only does the store boast several sizes of their sample dresses, but alterations are included. these dresses weren't all that different than the high end $4000+ dresses, and not even melissa sweet nor birnbaum & bullock have material that exquisitely mimics vera wang's lightweight silk shantung on her $10G+ gowns. casablanca also seems to have a lot of lacey-sleevy dresses from what i've seen of their website, also a bit of a rarity in this day and age of "sleeveless" (aka tube top) wedding dresses.