Tracy & Bob | A Pilot House Wedding
Tracy & Bob gave me an awesome opportunity to photograph them in their new home state of Nevada earlier this year and their wedding day felt like something of a gift, as well. Back in the state where they met – Wisconsin – Tracy & Bob’s wedding day was just as quintessentially Milwaukee as their engagement session was perfect Las Vegas. (If you haven’t read their how-we-met story detailed in the engagement post you simply have too – it’s one of my all time favorites.) Back in Milwaukee…a traditional catholic ceremony followed by an elegant reception at the Pilot House with its stunning 360 degree views of the city and lake set the tone for a day that was meaningful, delightful, and very personal for two people already building a life of their own. Tracy and Bob know, love and respect one another deeply so their moments alone together here and there throughout the day felt heavy with meaning but light with happiness and my camera picked up on all the deliciousness of two people being – really being – in love.
Veuve Cliquot magically followed these two around all day and I thought the constant presence of some bubbly was a perfect compliment to her luxurious dress and his classic tux. I love the above right photo of the sweet limo driver watching from the sidelines and holding such precious cargo.
The Pilot House at Discovery World is a classy place that doesn’t require much dressing up, but simple pink roses set off by black glass and crystals took the elegance to another level. While guests laughed and enjoyed themselves a vintage-inspired band played on. Between fox trots and bites of cake Tracy & Bob snuck quiet moments alone together throughout the evening and I adore the results.
Tracy & Bob ~ I wish every day of your life could be even just 1/8th as magical as your wedding day. Thank you for the chance to spend it with you and to get to know you just a little. It was spectacular.
The Details ~
Dress: Simone Carvalli
Veil: Eva’s Bridal
Shoes: Bellissima Bridal
Tuxedos: JoS. A. Bank
Florist: Impressions by Esther Fleming
Church: Saints Peter & Paul Catholic Church
Reception: Pilot House at Discovery World
Cake/Sweets: Peter Sciortino’s Bakery
Band: Myles Hayes Quartet
Make-up, hair and nails: Erik Of Norway Salon
After Wedding Cocktails (Afternoon): Milwaukee Athletic Club Pub
After Reception Late Night Pizza: Calderone Club
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It is an amazing experience for me to photograph a couple’s wedding day, made better only when I can share in their family as it grows, too. Margaret and Kevin were married on an uncharacteristically warm November day a few years back and their lives now include the delightfully sweet-cheeked, determined 3 month old Evelyn Rose. She decided to be rather serious during our session despite mom and dad’s best efforts to make her giggle. However, even without too many smiles on her part she inspired copious amounts of love and affection and tender cuddles. She was unusually sleepy, too so we just went with it and allowed the session to be about capturing some genuine family moments. I adore these sleepy, wonderfully comfortable photos of all three of them, just being together.
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Mr. Beckett and his sweet family keep giving me awesome opportunities to capture snippets of their life in photographs and I couldn’t be happier – or more humbled. Beckett’s talented parental duo keep impressing me with their style and dry wit, plus mom rocks some serious design skills. She designed my new logo (just look at the top of the blog!) and a suite of hilariously mature birthday paper and accoutrements for Mr. Beckett’s first birthday. These three make me smile and laugh and awww a little; I think they’ll do the same to you.
Bay View is a little pocket of urban awesomeness south of Milwaukee where Beckett’s family lives and they specifically wanted to incorporate the colors and textures of their neighborhood. I am so looking forward to seeing and photographing how Mr. Beckett grows into not only his little man tie, but also his big kid neighborhood.
Astella Quinn | Modern Wisconsin Newborn Photography
Astella Quinn is the newborn daughter of two like minds and souls who met in architecture school. Mom’s now an interior designer and dad’s an architect so Astella might just grow up with some serious design sense. But for now she’s hard at work relaxing and eliciting a serious quantity of oohs and aahs from her mom, dad, and Aunt Melissa, who was on hand for our shoot one lazy afternoon last week. Fur siblings Lena and Riley spent a little time in front of the camera, as well, with Riley rivaling sweet Norm for best baby dog ever.
I love love love this last photo of Astella. In some improbable way she looks powerful. I didn’t expect to see strength when I was going for soft and sweet. Somehow Astella Quinn is already managing both.
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Destination: India {part 2}
Hubby and I always follow a very simple trip planning rule: start off with a bang. I thought all of India counted as the bang so I didn’t pay much attention to what came in which order on our itinerary but, in retrospect, our bang came at the end: Varanasi.
We loved the Taj Mahal and all of the cities Rakesh carefully led us through; we reveled in all the craziness and clamour of Jaipur, Agra, Orchha, and Jhansi equally – from 1000 year old tantric temples to naked Jain monks traveling on foot while their Tour de France style support car followed behind. Not everyone would have loved these things, but we judge the merits of a particular travel destination based on a pretty broad set of criteria. Preferably our time in a locale is equal parts vacation in the traditional sense of the word and equal parts anthropological and sociological exploration. Up until Rakesh left us at the Jhansi train station for our overnight to Varanasi I wasn’t sure if I was going to get more than a much needed vacation during our travels. But from Jhansi on it was as if we got to see behind the curtain – tourist, modern India under our proverbial belts, we would be moving ahead into the much larger and difficult (sur)real India where old and new are duking it out furiously everyday. Our first clue was the complete normalcy of a giant bull strolling down our train tracks, our second the slow realization that the train platform was silently self-organized by caste. We slept fitfully through the night and awoke to watch the vast Indian landscape roll by, ox plows laboring next to Cup-o-Noodle Factories and all, before emerging into the early heat of a Varanasi day.
Varanasi is the holiest city of Hinduism. Kind of like Vatican City or Jerusalem, except that its even older (supposedly the oldest continuously occupied city in the world.) Hindus send their dead to be cremated on the banks of the great wide Ganges river and the funeral pyres burn 24 hours a day in some spots. Ancient temples and modern universities crowd the city and the millions of people who perfunctorily or ritualistically bathe in the Ganges each day crowd it even more. Strung out over more than 8 miles of river, the city literally steps down to receive its greatest asset at high water or low. Goats and Water Buffalo share the banks with Sadhus, boatmen and children selling candled flower bowls. For a magical day or two we shared it with them, too.
The Ganges River is the spiritual heart of this most spiritual city and every night – every night – a fantastic ritual that has nothing to with commerce, collection plates or anything other than devotional prayer plays out on its banks: the Aarti Ceremony.
We threaded our way through a sea of local shoppers enjoying a pedestrian street at dusk to the particular ghat where the Aarti is held each day. We ran into a new friend who had shown us much of the city that day, for karma he said, no tip, no money and he meant it. He led us to a platform perch where many well-dressed faithful where already seated, brought Brian a tiny cup of masala chai and the bells began to ring. The ritual is simple and repetitive: the priests face the divine – the Ganges – and turn clockwise while meditating with various items – fire, incense, marigolds, oils and more. Bells clang and live singing plays over loudspeakers, the crowd claps in unison. The young priests seem to go into a sort of lovely trance, mouthing the words to the songs and gliding through the movements. An impossibly long note is blown on a conch shell by the central priests and we all file down the steps to light our flowered candle bowls and set them adrift on the Ganges current: a thousand floating wishes flickering down stream.
We followed the post-Aarti rush back into the streets and encountered more fantastic rituals. Numerous wedding parties paraded through the streets (it was a lucky Tuesday for marriage according to the zodiac we were told.) Each horse, wagon or elephant mounted groom was announced by drum corps and preceded by columns of people balancing light sculptures on their heads. All of this is in turn was tethered to bicycles or wagons carrying generators to support the light show.
Practically inflated by the experiences of the day we allowed ourselves a few hours of sleep. We rose before the sun and headed back to the same ghat for a morning boat ride that would glide us past the treasures of the city and its people.
Overwhelmed, fascinated, practically in love and hungry for more we had to leave Varanasi for points west. Our last stop in India and our true big bang, Varanasi ensured that we got more than a vacation. Prior to Varanasi we understood that faith was a big part of life in India but in Varanasi we got a sense of its pull, its attraction, its magic, if you will. Cab drivers tapped the brakes and bowed their heads at each street-side shrine. Graduating college students visited temples en masse still dressed in their caps and gowns. Our friend shared his day with us for a little good karma. Hubby and I aren’t Hindu, but we hope karma is real and that all those who seek to cultivate the good stuff get it back in heaping helpings.
Next time: Morocco (I know you are thinking India to Morocco? Huh? But yes, we ended our India trip…in Morocco.)
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Destination: India {part 1}
India is overwhelming and utterly defined by its contrasts. So much of my experience of the country and people can only be recounted in dualities. It is luminously beautiful, garrish-ly rich and totally accessible. It is darkly dirty, impossibly poor and so much lives unsaid and unexplained to a foreigner’s eye. Unlike any other country I’ve been to, India resists my attempts to classify, to summarize, to neatly compartmentalize my experience there. Even the dominant religion – Hinduism – is more or less based on the idea that you get to choose what god speaks to you and how you want to worship him or her. The only unifying thread I can verbalize is that it is a feast for the senses, a place where one simply has to give-in: Give-in to the raucous clamor of the streets and the temple. Give-in to the unidentifiable spices on the tongue at dinner time. Give-in to the sweet, simple act of inhaling fresh flowers and to the less attractive smell of animal husbandry. Give-in to the massively overwhelming grandeur of what can be built with unfathomable quantities of human labor, princely pride and royal fortune. Which brings me to the reason we went to India.
My husband and I trade off Big Vacation Destination selections each year. This year India was my choice and the question that everyone asked me was why? My gut reaction answer: well, that’s where the Taj Majal is and I mean seriously, it is literally a monument to Love. I, like a lot of people, have seen countless photographs of the building, studied it in Art History class and know that its a giant tomb monument dedicated to the third wife of a long dead king. But I also know that most places that make it to the top 10 photographed monuments in the world list are probably there because they are just that freakin’ cool. (Okay, I don’t know if there really is a top 10 Photographed List, but surely the Taj Majal is on it – way after the Eiffel Tower but somewhere before the Golden Gate Bridge. After all there are 1 billion people in India alone and from what I saw a solid chunk of them travel domestically and take their cameras with them. But that, oddly, is the subject of another post.)
Back to the Taj. Nestled on a river bank away from the crazy streets of Agra we approached on foot in the dark before sunrise. Hidden behind massive gates and at the center of some seriously gorgeous landscape and architectural symmetry, the Taj is revealed to visitors in the early light of sunrise and it made me sigh, stare, cry a little and sign again. And best of all, as long as one dons these horrible little hair nets for shoes it can be explored up close and personal. Am I gushing? I think I’m gushing. But that’s because it was the catalyst, the inspiration, The Reason, for our trip and it did not disappoint. For someone who loves love like I do it felt a little like going to the source.
The Taj is visible across town and from many lookout points. The day grew hazy after sunrise, but I love the thin cloak of mystery that such haze adds to the image above. Hinduism and its practitioners made the largest cultural impact while we were in India but India’s Islamic past was very present in many of the sites we chose to see. The Taj was built by an Islamic ruler and many Islamic sites – from giant abandoned minarets to working mosques preparing for Friday prayer – were on our route.
- Each string represents a wish or prayer and is tied to the stone latice-work of the mosque.
The Islamic sites seemed rather frozen in comparison to the Hindu temples and sites we visited. Hindu prayer can be a loud, messy affair accompanied by bells, clapping, singing and incense. All at the same time. It was a little startling for me at first coming from a Methodist and now Quaker tradition (I guess you could say I’m trending to the quieter end of the religious spectrum) but ultimately India struck me as a place where energy rules. So why wouldn’t it rule worship, too? My favorite temple was the Monkey Temple outside of Jaipur where we had close encounters with animals of many kinds and were blessed by a Hindu priest.
Are you dizzy yet? From love to prayer to monkeys, I’ve taken this post all over the place. Just like India pushed and pulled me around until I finally I just gave-in and went along for the ride.
Next time: Prayers to the River Ganges
Stephen Charles | Milwaukee family photography
Stephen’s first birthday was celebrated in Dr. Seuss style, striped top hat included. He brought his Suessical duds, favorite chair and wheels to the studio just after his 1st birthday to play and laugh and show-off a bit. I was lucky enough to get to capture it all in photographs for his sweet, super-smitten parents Lindsey & Trevor. They are my favorite kind of client – the ones I get to grow and experience life with, the ones who let me walk with them not only on their wedding day but also as the family they chose to form grows person by person. Lindsey & Trevor were married before I started blogging but you can see a perfect, jubilant picture of them on my website’s fanmail page. They’re the ones on the left that look like they just won the lottery. I think with the birth of Stephen Charles they might really have won it.
At the end of the session Stephen decided he was really more interested in the architecture, lights and gear in the room than getting his photo taken. So on a lark we setup a little Photobooth! to capture his inquisitive pointing, laughing and questioning looks. The result was fun and silly and light-hearted.
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