Vancouver & Lower Mainland Portrait Photographer

Rebecca De Jong is a wedding and portrait photographer serving Vancouver, Lower Mainland and the Fraser Valley.

WEDDING | Jessica & Jason | Surrey Wedding Photography

04.26.09

Jessica is beautiful, thoughtful, and organized. Down to the last flower in the last vase, she knew where it was supposed to go. Jason perhaps knew a little less about the details, but he did know one important thing – that this organized, beautiful woman was the one he was meant to be with forever.

I love weddings like this one. When everything is happy and perfect, and you just get such a warm fuzzy feeling inside. Not to mention we were blessed with the most perfect March weather anyone in the history of weddings has ever seen. The wedding was on a Sunday. The day before (a Saturday; usually the more popular day for weddings) poured. No – it bucketed rain. It was abysmal. So you can imagine how surprised and ecstatic I was when the very next morning the sun decided to come out and stay out all day long. And that’s not all. There were clouds too! Big, dark clouds that produce the kind of light every photographer dreams of. I’ll show you what I mean in a bit.

Because of my decision to traipse across to Peru in February/March, this was my very first wedding of 2009. I have a feeling it might ‘take the cake’ for my favourite wedding images so far.

I started off in the morning with Jessica and the girls. (Jessica’s make-up was done by the fabulous Abbey Ratcliff of Abbazon Artworks, and her beautiful hair by Katrina of Razor’s Edge Hair Gallery )

I found some time to fit in a few detail shots (I love doing these, and sometimes have to remind myself to stop posing inanimate objects and check on what the real people are doing.) :P

I then ran over to where the guys were getting ready (luckily only one block away!) to get a shot of Jason and this AWESOME car Jessica surprised him with for the morning!

…..and then back to the girls just in time for the dress!

The ceremony took place in Chilliwack at the White Album Wedding Chapel – for photography purposes, other than having an outdoor ceremony (which would have been a bit chilly in March!) little wedding chapels are second best. :)

We took the family portraits following the ceremony in the chapel garden, where I ran into a common group-shot dilemma. The garden had many perfect backdrops for group shots (greenery, tall shrubs, etc.) but the problem here was that the sun was out for most of the shots. My Number One Rule for group shots is to not face my subjects into the sun – they will blink, squint, be generally unhappy, and will get terrible ‘racoon-eye’ shadows. Big no-no. In this particular location, the only good lighting angle was the only bad background – there were some houses behind it! Just my luck. But I always go with quality of light over quality of background, so with the houses I went, and managed to edit out quite a bit of ‘house’ in post processing. The lighting I got from that angle was definitely worth it:

This one is Jessica with her dad. Cute!

Controlled lighting on the face + Backlighting to highlight the hair/make the veil ‘glow’ = perfect.

We travelled on to Fort Langley with the Wedding Party where we really just had some fun.

And, as always, lots of prettiness:

My favourite shot of the day:

It was also Jessica’s younger sister (and bridesmaid)’s birthday! Everyone sang happy birthday to her at the reception. :)

We decided to go check out this old chapel on a whim, and look what happened:

Magic!

We almost got chased away from this shot by a scary barking dog. One of the groomsmen calmed the dog down, and we got the shot! (Trespassing is quickly becoming a major part of my job!) The sky in the background is what I was talking about earlier – you just can’t fake this kind of lighting. Beautiful.

My other favourite: (Note to Jessica: if this one below doesn’t make it into your ‘album picks’, I will probably sneak it in there anyway. Just to warn you.) :P