Meanwhile Mark was photographing Daniel preparing for the day…

…And then he went to Kohl Mansion in Burlingame to capture the preparations. The elegant brick mansion is a Catholic college preparatory school as well as a beautiful wedding venue with a magnificent Great Hall – the perfect backdrop for the gorgeous flowers.

When Tania arrived at the mansion she was whisked up the back stairs to a room overlooking the ceremony area where she could peep out and see the guests arriving.

Now it was time to use the grand staircase, escorted by her dad!

I couldn’t stop smiling when the precessional music started – no Wagner’s Bridal Chorus for Tania – but probably my all time favorite Smiths’ song, There is a Light That Never Goes Out, performed orchestrally by the Vitamin String Quartet! DJ Henry Kim did a “live mix” of the song so that the high point of the song started just as Tania reached the top the aisle!

The ceremony was beautiful; Tania and Daniel looked so happy and kept bursting into giggles.

We managed to capture a few pictures of Tania and Daniel before we took the group photographs against the bougainvillea.

Best men, Mike and Jason enjoying a little Dutch courage before the speeches:-)

At the start of the reception the wedding party was introduced. This picture made me laugh; Tania and Daniel started strolling to the doorway and then burst into a sprint and then straight into a traditional Armenian dance!

Tania and Daniel met at Tania’s brother Sami’s, and Daniel’s sister Raluca’s, engagement party!

The first dance.

The truly sumptuous Great Hall.

Right at the end of the evening we got a few minutes to capture some romantic shots under the fairy lights. Then it was back to dancing for Tania and Daniel and home for Mark and I.

What an amazing day – the most adorable couple and lovely family, friends and venue…perfect!

Venue – Kohl Mansion
Floral design – Pacifico Soriano Designs
Wedding cake – Have Your Cake
Catering – Schumann’s Four Seasons Catering
Hairstylist and makeup artist – Nora Arechiga
DJ – Henry Kim @ Big Fun Disc Jockeys
Videography – Mirar Productions
Photo-booth – Denon and Doyle
Limousine – Lone Star Transportation
Pastor – Rev Balabanian
Wedding coordinator – Barbara Cleary

With Lauren’s love of dance it wasn’t hard to get her feet moving and twirling her dress. This is something we like to ask a bride to do, it makes for a bit of fun and lovely dynamic images.

I really like the result Mark got when he started shooting with a slow shutter speed. When processed in black and white a gorgeous piece of art transpired.

I adore shooting into bright sunlight; it gives everything a dreamy look and the sunflowers I picked up from our local florist Flower Flour in Willow Glen look so gorgeous and romantic.

Every bride should have a Trash the Dress session; what better excuse to spend a little extra carefree time in your beautiful gown?!

A few miles down the coast in La Honda is the wedding venue, Chateau La Joye, sweet, rustic and perfect. The charming chalk board welcomed us in.

It was impossible to hold back the tears when Lauren’s dad saw her for the first time in her wedding dress. Lauren looked gorgeous; her Mum’s veil complementing her beautiful gown perfectly.

The wedding was conducted by Lauren’s Uncle and Jessica sang “When I Say I Do” beautifully throughout the wine ceremony.

During the cocktail hour we took a rather informal approach to the “formal” photography – encouraging laughter and relaxed poses; our goal – to keep things as fast and fun as possible.

This was such a laid back and relaxed wedding, our couple focused on being with family and friends and simply enjoying the day with a plentiful flow of wine and good food. The wedding was beautiful throughout. Here are some more of our favourites from the day…

Lauren’s Grandpa’s 1932 Ford Roadster whisked them away at the end of the evening.

Lauren and John, their family and friends, are the loveliest people, so a huge thank you to them all for making Mark and I feel so at home.

Why am I a wedding photographer…? Being in the presence of so much love – I just adore it!

Wedding venue and coordinator
Live Band
Wedding cake

We had a wonderful time bombing around San Francisco, taking in the amazing versatility the city has to offer on one of those rare summer days where the sun was out in all its glory. It was a pleasure to capture this couple’s love for one another, so apparent in their interaction with each other on this beautiful Sunday afternoon.

We met in Mission Dolores park, along with a thousand other people; Tania and Daniel each carrying a big red balloon! Not wanting to seek attention (ha ha) they joked and shared some intimate moments on a bench with probably one of the best views in the city.

Next stop was a tranquil corner of the Golden Gate Park – not a soul to be seen, just a crazy couple with their balloons!

By the time we reached The Palace of Fine Arts, we were a balloon down, (it escaped to balloon heaven) so we ended the session with romantic shoots amongst a backdrop of grandiose columns and domes and those magnificant green doors.

This lovely couple will be getting married in September at Kohl Mansion, so be sure to check back for a posting on what is going to be an amazing wedding.

We travelled to Lake Tahoe, meeting our couple at beautiful Sand Harbor where we spent a couple of hours clambering over huge granite rocks, paddling in gently lapping water, and generally having fun.
Trashed dress? No – it’s safe and clean back in its protective layers… But it did get worn again!

Here are a few of our favorite images from the day…

We’re delighted to see Today’s Bride magazine are now featuring their gorgeous day on the About Weddings website in the Real Weddings section

It’s a little disappointing the photographs are cropped into a square format – especially the panorama shots – as you lose the drama, but please check out our blog post from last year to see them in their full glory!

I also noticed their florist was featured in April’s edition of Sunset magazine!

The winning print was a photo-journalistic (or as we say reportage!) image from Todd and Aline’s wedding last September. Maybe there was something lucky about the date also being our wedding anniversary!?

Maria rode in the limo between the ceremony and reception and got this fabulous pic, which we think is a really fun capture.

The print competition required a mated 16 x 20″ print, which we printed and mounted ourselves. We’re really pleased that our printing and mounting skills have also been awarded at such a high level of competition.

We would like to thank all our wonderful clients that have made this possible.

tobeadored only shoots a select number of weddings a year, so this has been especially gratifying. May this be the first of many!

Full press release below:
Santa Clara, CA – Jan 26, 2011 – WeddingWire, the nation’s leading wedding technology company, is thrilled to announce tobeadored llc has been selected to receive the prestigious annual WeddingWire Bride’s Choice Awards™ 2011 for Wedding Photography!

Recognition for the Bride’s Choice Awards™ 2011 is determined by recent reviews and extensive surveys from over 750,000 WeddingWire newlyweds. Our past clients are among those that shared their experiences on WeddingWire, the largest wedding review site in the nation.

tobeadored stands among the top five percent of wedding professionals in the WeddingWire community, representing quality and service excellence within the wedding industry. Awards were given to the top wedding professionals across 20 service categories, from wedding venues to wedding photographers, and were based on the overall professional achievements throughout the past year.

“WeddingWire is honored to celebrate the success of the top-rated wedding professionals within the WeddingWire community,” said Timothy Chi, WeddingWire’s Chief Executive Officer. “With the annual Bride’s Choice Awards™ program, WeddingWire has the unique opportunity to recognize the best wedding professionals across the US and Canada. We applaud tobeadored for their professionalism and dedication to enhancing the wedding planning experience last year.”

We are happy to announce that tobeadored is among the very best Wedding Photographers within the WeddingWire Network, which includes leading wedding planning sites WeddingWire, Martha Stewart Weddings, Project Wedding and WeddingBee. We would like to thank our past clients for nominating us to receive the Bride’s Choice Awards™ 2011.

For more information, please visit our WeddingWire Storefront today at www.WeddingWire.com/tobeadored or our main website at http://www.tobeadored.com

For more information on the Bride’s Choice Awards™ 2011, please visit www.WeddingWire.com

Only the paranoid survive is a great way to paraphrase the required workflow for a photographer working with digital cameras!
We encourage you to think like this – if your files are not located on at least three different disks, your data doesn’t truly exist!
For anyone not backing up any data, that should be a wake up call.

Cameras and cards
Canon shooters, we shoot RAW, so our files are around 20MB each(!), and we shoot to lots of 4GB cards. We consider 4GB cards the right balance between risk of image loss from a card corruption and frequency of replacing the cards in the camera. To ensure we never have a corruption, we always format the cards in camera – even when we know they are blank. This ensures the disk starts clean before the first image is written to it. (No corruptions yet, but this readiness prevents Hope being our strategy!)

Workstations and studio systems
Our workstations are Mac Pros. These have multiple hard disks, but we combine two disks in a striped RAID for the main work disk to increase performance. Since we use Macs, we use the wonderful Time Machine to back up this and other disks to a firewire drobo array – four disks in a redundant array means that the backup cannot be easily lost from a single disk error on the backup itself. I love Time Machine – it has saved our bacon on more than one occasion…
This takes a snapshot of the system at an hourly interval, but we manually force additional backups immediately after file imports.

Around each Mac Pro, we additionally have a second firewire drobo array that we use entirely for local manual backups.
We use Chronosync to sync our various working disks and projects to this drobo. The techie in me loves to script, so we have automated many processes to ensure we always have a second clean backup, local to the Mac.

Import to workstation
We use Lightroom (LR3) to manage and edit our images.
For each project, we have a project template directory structure, complete with legal files, project templates and notes for each step of the process. This ensures consistency in every project, and nothing is overlooked. Each project gets its own Lightroom catalog and directory structure. Anyone familiar with Kevin Kubota’s Lightroom workflow will recognize our project flow as an adaptation of what Kevin suggests in his books – and it is recommended reading!

Before importing the images into Lightroom, we manually copy all Flash cards into a RAW project folder that is immediately archived and replicated. That way, we have a complete record of every shoot and know all images are safe if any are accidentally deleted later.
We import this RAW folder into the Lightroom client catalog.

Two things I really hate about the current version of Lightroom (LR3) are that it can’t do print proofing, and worse, it has no way to allow multiple users to access one database simultaneously. In a small studio with several people needing access to these files, this can be a productivity bottleneck.
To overcome this limitation, we export and sync the catalogs to a Network disk (NAS) – again using RAID disks for redundancy – and this allows catalog export / import from different machines. It’s a fix, and hopefully Adobe will give us a better solution in LR4 or 5?

The RAW Lightroom backup is also backed up to this NAS disk.

The final step in our asset management is to backup the projects to removable hard drives. We backup all projects to TWO hard disks using an eSATA card in the Mac. These disks can be stored at a different location and / or stored in a fire safe to ensure we have triplicate copies of project files.
Again, Chronosync is the gem that ensures we never lose a byte, as every sync gets a data verification pass as well!

We no longer use DVDs or CDs to archive material. They are simply not good enough, regardless of alleged quality. Multiple hard disks appears to be the most optimal method now.

Post process workflow
Beyond Lightroom we also use Photoshop and other image manipulation tools, but the project structures, and Lightroom management ensure our flows are non-destructive. We can always re-trace our steps in any image, and never lose data.

Anna was being pampered at The Ritz Carlton’s beauty salon along with her big sister and dear friends from her home town of Chicago, and Paul was relaxing in their honeymoon suite, catching up with his Best Man who’d traveled from England along with Paul’s family.

Anna looked beautiful in her wedding gown of ivory lace, complemented perfectly with her late Mother’s pearls.

After the ceremony, where Anna was “given away” by her three brothers, we headed off in the decorated golf cart to picturesque locations for romantic photos. How we’d have loved to have whisked them away for an hour or so, as the evening light was just perfect, but back at Mullins Bar and Grill there were guests to be greeted, toasts to be made, speeches to be given, delicious food to be eaten and dancing to be done!

After the meal Anna’s sister, Christina, brought tears to our eyes when she spoke of their parents and performed a Polish-style offering of bread to the bride and groom. From Paul’s side the speeches were typical British style – lots of jokes, sentimental thoughts and gentle teasing of the groom – resulting in a wonderful blending of cultures.

And the celebrations will continue later in the year… with receptions at Lumley Castle, Chester-Le-Street in England and Lido in Chicago next year!

For Anna and Paul, their wedding day really was the start of the rest of their lives. With a move to the UK to join Paul, and new work opportunities for Anna, this lovely couple will no longer have that big pond separating them. We send you all our love for the most wonderful future together xxxx

Flowers by Alena Jean
Wedding officiant Terry plank
Wedding cake by Cakes by Maggie