The ceremony was indoors in the clubhouse which had massive windows looking over a field of snow that is apparently a lake in the summer. The band The Ruffled Feathers were unique and very good and the cake, oh the cake, scroll down and look for yourself. One of the most stunning designs I’ve seen – those flowers they were all individually hand made and yes, edible. Well, they were mostly sugar so I wouldn’t really eat them but they looked amazing.

Full post with more images is coming soon.

Video was produced and directed by Laurent Goldstein from Citrus Pie Marketing Group – a film buff himself  - he rented more than 1200 titles from Videomatica over the last two and a half decades. It was shot by myself and Eric San Pablo Chu and edited by me.

Ashish and Manku were headed to India for their wedding but they wanted their engagement photos done here in Vancouver. Ashish flew up from LA just for the weekend so rescheduling was not an option. But, with all of the meteorological chalenges we managed to capture some beauty of this city and the west coast that they can share with their families back on the sub-continent.

We started by taking some photos in downtown Vancouver, in front of the Olympic Torch and some beautiful foliage but few minutes later the sky cam down on us and we had to run indoors. Luckily, the Convention Center was next door and the beautiful wood wall was a perfect backdrop. For some strange reason, security wasn’t happy with us taking pictures inside even though every tourist in the building was snapping photos of the gorgeous wall! For some reason engagement photos are bad for their publicity!?

Engagement Photos - Vancouver Convention Center

Again, only few minutes later another change of weather occurred, this time for better, and we headed out to Stanley Park. By the time we got to the lighthouse, patches of blue sky started to show up and the wind started to blow the leafs off trees. Then, as we arrived to the sea wall near the Third Beach the wind picked up so much that the waves nearly washed them off into the sea. We made it through the session with dry clothes and some great engagement photos.

Take a look at the gallery with all of the engagement photos from this session

Since I have moved to Vancouver last year I have been shooting a lot of lifestyle portraits and wedding photography and I wanted to add some more work to my existing fashion portfolio so a few months ago I got together with Felicia Bromba, one of the most talented (and fun to work with) Make-Up artists in this part of the world and a gorgeous model/dancer Natalie Johannesen. The plan was to do a dark, film noar-ish shoot at the Beaumont Studios in Vancouver. What wasn’t in the plan is that I drop my camera on the pavement as I was opening the car! Canon 5D MKii is a well built camera so there was (luckily) no damage to it but the fall shook up the battery contacts and the camera kept shutting off on it’s own every few seconds. Luckily I still have my old camera and out it came for the first time in years. So with worries about my 5D set aside for a few hours we continued the shoot and managed to get some great images from it.

Lesson learned – make sure all of the zips and clips on your camera case are secure when you place it in the car.

This past week there has been a lot of messaging going on between all of the Vancouver wedding photographers as to what are the best spots in town to shoot in the rain. While the hot weather on the East coast is breaking records, here in Vancouver we are ‘enjoying’ what feels like a wet October.

We couldn’t reschedule a recent engagement session and wait for the summer to arrive because Madilyn had to fly back to Las Vegas. She was only in town for a few short days visiting her fiancé who is a baseball player for the Vancouver Canadians. I figured that wet and green engagement photographs would nicely compliment her bright and sunny wedding pictures when they get married in Vegas this December: from rain forest to desert.

We headed to Stanley Park, Vancouver’s #1 asset, and a perfect example of everything that is beautiful in this part of the world: forests, mountains and ocean. High trees and the forest canopy hid us from the rain most of the day. It stopped raining just in time for us to take some shots with the city skyline as the backdrop and catch a tiny glimpse of sunset shining through the dramatic cloudy sky on Second beach.

Rain doesn’t really matter when you have a fun and good looking couple to work with.

Earlier this year local photographer and pilot Laura Johnston, whom I’ve met at the Big Lights Far Away workshop in January, invited a group of photographers to the local airport outside of Vancouver. So a few of us put our gear together and located a few models nice enough enough to pose for us on that cold morning. We played around with planes on the runway and in the hangar all day.

The low stage makes the artists feel like they are almost part of the crowd (and it makes it easy for the crowd to join them on stage like they did for the encore of the Morcheeba gig) and it is a perfect venue for photographing bands. Here are a few of my favorite moments from past year at the Commodore Ballroom.

Raphael Saadiq

Morcheeba

Gogol Bordelo

Grinderman

KT Tunstall

Maceo Parker

Morcheeba

The couple was styled by the article writer Molly Millar and the location was Blue Water Cafe + Raw Bar in Yaletown, Vancouver. The behind the scenes video was shot and edited by Chico Sousa.

Next stop was a more recent Vancouver landmark – the site of the Olympic flame from last years Winter Olympics.

Being the longest day of the year and with the sun still high in the sky at 8:00 pm we headed to Gastown and found a cool alley – the only quiet spot in Gastown that evening because of the big street music festival.

Final destination was a perfect solstice sunset on Second Beach in Stanley Park.