Engagement Photos

I didn't have any big expectations as far as our wedding was concerned. I don't have a lot of money, so I had to rely on family & friends to help out, and I couldn't be a diva in those circumstances. Besides, lower expectations mean you can't be disappointed, right? :) It also means that you have the opportunity to be delighted beyond your dreams. That happened to me with our wedding. Everything came together in such a perfect way, thanks to lots of help from my loved ones. One of my favorite phrases this past month has been, "It's a wedding miracle!" :) I am so grateful for all that happened, and I'll try to share it all here.

One of the coolest and most unexpected miracle was our engagement photo shoot. I was heading to Rancho Cucamonga for Kim & Dave's reception, and we still didn't have an engagement photo. My girl Karly is quite handy with the lens, so I called her to ask her just to take a picture of Cody & I by a tree somewhere near the reception and we would use that. :) She called back with a counter offer - her dad, an amazing professional photographer, would do an entire shoot with multiple locations for us and give us all the images for FREE. All we had to do was come to Rancho on Saturday. Done and DONE! Saturday happened to be my birthday, and it was the bestest present ever. Not only did he, his wife & Karly spend hours taking pictures of us, but he called in a favor & arranged to have my hair and make-up done for free too! I am still in shock at his generousity. I don't have the highest self-esteem right now...due to my health problems, I am quite swollen and puffy and intermittently covered in red dots. I was trying to slim down last year after working graveyards and doing a number on my body when my thyroid problems started, so not only can I not lose weight, I look larger due to puffyness. So for a gal in my position who hates how she looks, this was a miracle. Not only did they do wonders with my make-up, Don knew how to get all my best angles too. I am so pleased with our photos, and to have such a stunning engagement photo was a huge boost that cheered me up and helped me get more joy out of the excruciating process of trying to plan a nice wedding on a shoe-string budget.

I didn't want to post these before the wedding, because I used the images in my DIY projects and in our slideshow, so I didn't want to ruin the "surprise." :)













I loved their use of sepia and black & white!

The one we used for our invitations is featured in an earlier post, and I hope you all got one in the mail too. Seeing most of the pictures now, would you have gone with what we did? If not, which would you have chosen?

So thank you to the Atherton/Cahoon clan, especially Don for this precious gift. I can't explain in words how much it means to me to have this special time captured on film, in a way I can be proud of, to share with friends, family, and especially our children & grandchildren!