Rochelle & Alex's Detroit Wedding

Rochelle & Alex decided to combine the classic architecture of Detroit with the cultural flair of Jamaica (Rochelle's heritage) for their wedding day. Rochelle is one of those girls who's always organized and on top of everything, so I knew her wedding would be full of great details and personal touches!

The day started off with the girls getting ready in one of the carriage houses at the Inn on Ferry Street.





Forgot about your nails before the wedding day? Press-ons to the rescue!


I've never seen a dressmaker add boobs to a hanger before... this just cracks me up!


The Cathedral of the Most Blessed Sacrament is just gorgeous inside and out!



Color Bar Creative did a fabulous job on all of the paper items for the wedding!


Definitely one of the most unusual props I've seen a minister use during a wedding ceremony!! Effective AND funny!




They had such a beautiful sunny day, but the WIND was crazy!





Despite the fact that the Belle Isle Casino didn't have power that day and had to run at half power with generators, everything still looked beautiful and everyone still had a great time!! (With a lot of help from Moments in Time coordinators to keep things running smoothly, of course!!) I have to give Rochelle the biggest kudos for handling several wedding day complications with the utmost grace!!



There's a great quote from Rochelle about the following picture, "This photo below is a double goody because he is smiling and dancing. We don’t really have any photos of my dad smiling. ….or dancing and now we have him doing both in one shot!"


I just love this picture of everyone watching Alex dance with his mom - so sweet!


One of the reasons Rochelle picked the reception location was so that she could bring in her own caterer who created special Jamaican dishes. She even had a special Jamaican rum cake, which was a huge hit - especially with this guy!!


Doesn't he look like he'll make a great dad someday?






I just love how this image combines the interior and exterior architecture of the old and modern Detroit. Yes, I'm very sentimental about my hometown. *sigh*

Holly & Sam Engagement

This engagement session almost didn't happen! When we planned to shoot Holly & Sam's engagement session, it was originally supposed to take place at a cider mill, with beautiful fall colors. However, a huge storm with chilling high winds rolled in that day and changed our plans. I was watching the doppler radar via internet all day long and determined that we should find a location that would allow us to utilize natural light, while still being covered from the elements. My choice: Belle Isle with its beautiful conservatory and covered porch around the casino building. I started getting tons of ideas about all of these great shots we could do that would incorporate raindrops, the conservatory settings, etc. However, plans had to change yet again when I arrived early to find that the conservatory was under renovation that day. Talk about bad luck!! Despite all of this, the show HAD to go on because I wasn't going to be back in Michigan for a while!!





Even under the covered porch of the building, it was incredibly windy on all but one side. Fortunately, all of that wind was pushing the storm out of the area, so the rain finally stopped, but it was still FREEEZING!! Holly & Sam were such troopers about braving the cold!! I made sure we took several "warm up" breaks by driving around in the car with the heat on. ;-)





Once the sun broke through a few clouds, the sky and lighting were AMAZING!!! It made weathering the storm, and sticking to our plans totally worth while.


(for some reason, cross processed images feel very "Detroit" to me)





The wind was an issue from time to time, but we found ways to make it work for us.





Normally I don't like really "dark" images, but I think I was inspired to create some after we had such a dark day.



When I was planning on rain, I had made some really cool plans to shoot through a rainy car window among some other awesome ideas (that I'll have to try with another couple), but with no rain drops on the windows, I quickly changed plans and created the shot below and the cool rear-view mirror shot inside the car where we were nice and warm! Despite all of the challenges leading up to our shoot... I would have to say that this was a total success!!



Technical notes for photographers: None of the images above were photoshopped other than sharpening for web and adding my logo. All of the post-processing work was done in Adobe Lightroom Beta. If you'd like to see the original straight from camera JPEG images, CLICK HERE to view the entire set of processed and unprocessed images on flickr. If you're a photographer and you haven't tried Lightroom yet, make sure you check it out while it's still free in Beta version.