The venue, the photographer, and the date!

It’s hard to believe that it’s been two months since our last wedding planning related blog post! But we did not forget about it, on the contrary, we spent all this time still searching for both the photographer and for the right venue. We could have never imagined that the planning would be so difficult from the beginning! We wanted to book the venue and photographer at the same time so that we wouldn’t limit our choice of photographer by the date we set. Sounds like it should be pretty easy, but it sure wasn’t! And so this last week was a big one for us and we finally have a date, a venue, and even the photographer of our dreams.

I’ll start with the most important part… drum roll please… the date of the wedding is….. 9/10/10! We are inviting just 30 people to the wedding and our hopes are that these people won’t mind taking the Friday off as it will allow all of us to spend the rest of the weekend relaxing.

The venue update is next: we absolutely fell in love with both the Ranch from our last blog post and also with the cute villa. It was a tough choice and we had to make a long list of pluses and minuses of both places. At the end we decided to go with the villa! Although both places are absolutely gorgeous, we felt that this venue would be a better match for our tiny wedding.

And lastly, the part everyone has been asking about ever since we got engaged… the photographer! This was honestly the toughest choice we’ve had to make. The challenge was that we both knew what style and type of photographer we wanted and we were absolutely not willing to compromise on it. Fortunately, we wanted more or less the same thing, otherwise we’d have to hire one photographer for the bride and one for the groom :)

We started our search by looking at Bay Area photographers, then at ones in Southern California. What we found is that although there are a ton of absolutely amazing artists in this state whom we adore and even sometimes idolize, their styles were a little different than what we had in mind. So our search circle got bigger and bigger, and we started looking at East Coast and even some Canadian photographers, until we finally found someone whose work we both absolutely admire:

We first learned of Greg Gibson a few years back at one of the photography conventions we attended. I remember that even then we were amazed at his strong photojournalistic approach and constant search for ways to tell the story. We were both beyond happy when he agreed to come out to Napa for our wedding!

Next on the list is the dress shopping and I’ll let you all know how that will go. Until then, have a great week everybody and stay dry in these upcoming storms!

Natasha