*First of all……yeah, I’m still alive but I, apparently, have been avoiding blogging like the plague.  I need to be better about it this off-season.  It’s just so hard when I can be curled up on the couch with a soft blanket and a warm Charlie cat instead of sitting at a computer.  Yep, I just put the blame on my cat.  This totally hasn’t been my fault.   😉

Okay….on to this beautiful wedding….

Photographing the wedding of a friend is a lot of fun.  There’s no pressure to try and quickly become BFF’s so that they’re comfortable being around me and in front of my camera, and I’m comfortable just being myself….no pressure to impress.  But when said friends ask you not only to photograph their wedding, but to do so in Santa Barbara…umm, hello….YES!!  And then it gets even better when they inform you that they just want some portraits done and pictures of the ceremony at the Santa Barbara Courthouse.  Once the ceremony is over my camera should be put away and eating amazing food and drinking to my heart’s content at their reception at The Canary Hotel will be my job for the remainder of the night.  Deal!

Zahra and Chris both work with my husband.  Chris has been living and working in Korea for, I guess, a little over a year now (I don’t know, I’m probably completely wrong with that time frame…oh well).  Between Zahra making trips to Korea and Chris making trips back here to Maryland, they are pros at making the long distance thing work.  So when it came time to plan the wedding, they decided what better place to have it than kind of in the middle?!  They decided on Santa Barbara and their intimate wedding became a beautiful event with their closest family and friends at the Santa Barbara Courthouse.  It was an honor to, not just be there to witness their vows to each other, but to document it for this amazing couple.  Over the years of knowing them it has become so obvious why they fell in love.  They’re absolutely perfect for each other.  They share a love of travelling and exploring every single corner of where they may end up, trying new foods, and drinking wine, just to name a few.  Zahra goes along when Chris needs his sailing fix and Chris has no problems with saying “whatever baby wants, baby gets”.  😉

I’m incredibly thankful for Zahra and Chris’s friendship with my husband and me, and just as thankful that I was given the pleasure of taking these photos for them to treasure forever.

These are wedding ducks, which are a Korean wedding tradition.  These ducks are Mandarin ducks, as, in nature, Mandarin ducks mate for life and they even mourn the death of the other.  You should read about them…it’s interesting stuff.