My Own Wedding
My wife and I had planned a beautiful wedding in Puerto Rico for June of 2020. A beautiful church, an even more beautiful venue… You probably already know where this is heading.
They say something will always go wrong on your wedding day, and the only thing you can control is how you react to it. I’d like to say we reacted pretty well to our situation. With the outbreak of Covid, our entire wedding got cancelled in April of 2020, and we had to start looking at other options. In-between calling airlines and businesses to try to get refunds for everything we had scheduled, we started planning our wedding for December of that same year. My wife grew up in San Antonio, and although I was raised around Dallas I’ve never been afraid to admit that San Antonio might be the best place Texas has to offer. Within just a few months, we found a beautiful church, a gorgeous venue on the riverwalk, photographer, DJ, florist… the works. The only thing we couldn’t manage in advance was a wedding cake, but a few “naked” cakes we ordered the day before from Central Market did the job just fine. We actually had a few people comment on how pretty they were and how good they tasted. We were not shy in letting them know they were $25 dollar grocery store cakes.
Cake Cutting Queen
Shot with my Nikon L35AF on Ilford HP5 plus
By the time of our wedding, I had already been shooting for a couple of years. We hired a great local photographer who took great care of us, but I still wanted to capture some of the day from my own perspective. I had recently bought a small Nikon film camera, and after putting a couple of rolls of film through it in the months leading up to the wedding, I felt confident I could sneak it around in my interior jacket pocket and snap all the most meaningful moments. It’s a point and shoot camera, which means that there’s no messing with settings or anything else that could take me out of my moments. Just point, and shoot. I’m really glad I did it, because I ended up with photos that I absolutely love. Since it’s so easy to operate, I could even hand it off to friends and family and let them have a go with it. Getting those photos developed and shipped back to us was such a fun way to reminisce on all the big and small moments we shared during our wedding, and the turnaround time was only a few weeks. I shot black and white at the wedding for that timeless film look. I’ve included a small gallery at the bottom of this post.
Our actual day went off without a hitch. We had dealt with our fair share of problems in the year leading up to the wedding, so it seemed like the universe had decided to let us have an easy time on our actual wedding day. It wasn’t what we had originally planned, and with continued covid restrictions we had a fraction of our original guest list, but it was a beautiful, memorable, joy-filled day, with all of our closest friends and family. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Your wedding won’t go perfectly to plan. Ours is a perfect example.
Something will go wrong, it’s inevitable. There’s a lot of moving parts, schedules, vendors, guests, and I’ve never seen a single day where something doesn’t go amiss. You can’t control everything, but you can control your reaction to it. Remember what’s important. Remember the reason you’re celebrating. This is the day where you fully commit yourself to the love of your life! It’s a beautiful thing, and next to that, every other little problem fades away.
-Philip
