The Hollywood-esque Photo Shoot

Thought you might like to see the (very fun) madness that ensued after our wedding and before the reception!

As you know, the wedding was at sunset, and the professional photographer and our videographer wanted to get some pictures of the families, the wedding party, and of the two of us together as the sun was going down. Much later, I realized it was a blessing that the two songs we lost out of the wedding didn't work...because it bought us about 8 more minutes to have sunset pictures!

We were hugging our guests after the wedding when the photographer broke up the party and said we'd need to do that later, because he had to hurry to get pictures! So we asked all the guests to hang around for a bit while we did the next photo shoot. During that time...everything looked a lot like this:

 I threw this picture in because I don't even know what I'm pointing at but I sure am having a violent reaction to it!! (By the way - this moment was also when I met the photographer for the first time. He'd arrived right before the wedding and had gone straight to the ceremony site. Ryan had greeted him but I was in hiding, so I met him officially after the ceremony!

 The first picture he wanted was a group picture. Unfortunately, Adam and Sara had gone back up to our room to get a couple of things we forgot to bring with us. So here's Ryan on the phone, trying to reach them to tell them to hurry back - and the photographer was doing a dress rehearsal with all of us on how to look way up at the camera he'd put in the air (on the end of a pole) so we could get the fishbowl effect.)

 They hurried. :)

 We got that photo, and then Ryan dismissed all the guests to go up near our room to prepare for the reception while we hung back to take pictures.

 I don't have any pictures of this part (yet) but it cracked me up - the photographer was (very understandably) on a tight timeline to get pictures before the sun went down. He's so good at what he does and was all business, shouting for MOM! DAD! HERE! Do you think any of my family members were listening? So finally I yelled "IF YOU'RE A FREELAN, YOU NEED TO COME STAND HERE! AND HURRY!!" Ohhhh Bekah the bridezilla. We tried to tell him we'd already done our own family pics but he insisted that he do more, so we did them! And then he had a shoot just with us. Ryan's mom took some pictures of that while he was busy.

By the way, our photographer was Stephen Rudd and this guy is SO GOOD. He's won a lot of awards, and his work is excellent. We are so excited to see his pics!

Here was one of our poses for Stephen.

 And another of our poses - and Stephen at work.

 Nita got some great sunset pics of us...Stephen was so excited about these just before we lost the sun entirely!!

 Little kissy!

 Ahhhhh perfect for a blog header pic, don't you think?? :)

 Ryan and I also had our first dance down on the beach - just the two of us. We danced to Jeremy Camp's song, My Desire, which was the first song we ever danced to back when we first started dating. (We danced a slow dance every night before we said goodbye. It was our thing.)

 Perfect. Just the two of us. Loved it so much.

As we were leaving the beach, a gentleman stopped me and said he'd taken some pictures on his phone and if I was interested, I could email him and he'd send them to me. He gave me his card and I wrote him right away. He sent some great pictures, so I wanted to share a few of them here. Thanks, John Reece!

Here you can see Stephen taking pictures, with the help of his assistant (by the same name.) And in the black there is Seth Cohen, who was our WONDERFUL videographer. We wanted good video so we can show it at our reception. He was so kind - came early, stayed late, and really took time to make sure we had everything we needed. I appreciated him SO much.

 Such a production!! Loved it. It was so much fun.

 We just kept doing whatever they told us to!

 Felt kind of like a princess. Not gonna lie. :)

This was the crazy busiest half hour of my LIFE but it was so much fun. We loved it. Cannot wait to see Stephen's pictures OR Seth's video! Ryan made great choices with these two! Thanks, Baby!