The Ninth Day of Christmas

Today's embarrassing moment wasn't embarrassing when it happened.  Only in retrospect.  When I look at the pictures.  Which I'm about to show you.

Remember how the Bionic Man and I recently celebrated an anniversary?  I found some old wedding pictures that the Bionic Man scanned into our files, and they sent me on a trip down memory lane.

Photogenic

The story of how these pictures came to be begins before our wedding.  The Bionic Man's sister, Kristine, got married a few weeks before we did.  Now a professional photographer, Kris was a photography student back when she got married.  She had all her wedding photography done by a photographer that she chose very carefully.  The images that he produced were everything Kristine and her mother dreamed of.  The portraits of Kristine and her groom were so breathtaking, that her mother had visions of creating a "wedding wall" in her home, where she planned to hang gorgeous, matching, professional portraits of her six children on their wedding days.

There was only one problem with that dream:  the Bionic Man and I had not planned to hire a professional photographer for our wedding.

We were budget-minded do-it-yourselfers even before we got married, and we just weren't planning to spend much money on photography for the wedding.  We figured we'd just have a few friends and family members snap pictures throughout the day, get duplicates of the prints, and call it good!

But snapshots were not part of The Wedding Wall vision.  Not only was my future-mother-in-law planning on something professional, she was planning for a portrait done by the same photographer who did Kristine's wedding.  The photographer who would charge extra for traveling the 80+ miles from his studio to our wedding location.

So we compromised.  The Bionic Man and I agreed to put the tux and dress back on after we came back from our honeymoon, and have the professional photo shoot that my mother-in-law wanted.

On the appointed day, the Bionic Man and I showed up at the designated location, a beautiful, old building in downtown Salt Lake City, popular with wedding photographers.  We made my sister and her husband come along, so that my sister could help me get into the rather complicated wedding dress once we arrived.  Poor Lorene and David did not know what they were getting into.

The photo shoot went well.  The photographer knew exactly where he wanted us to pose for the portraits, and quickly went through various poses.  All in the same spot of the building.  Unfortunately, the Bionic Man had envisioned a little more variety than that.  It was a large building, with many points of architectural interest.  The Bionic Man was less concerned about consistency in light and composition than he was about variety and fitting several Feats of Engineering into the background of our portraits.  He was able to convince the photographer to take a couple of pictures of me next to a piano (my mother's only request from the session), but after that, the photographer made it very clear that he was not going to follow us all over the building snapping photos.  He was done.

But the Bionic Man and I weren't!  We were going to get all the mileage out of that white tux and nine foot veil that we possibly could!  So, after the photographer left, we dragged David and Lorene all over for our own, personal photo shoot.  (You didn't have anything better to do that day, did you, David and Lorene?)  David manned the camera, and the Bionic Man and I picked all the backgrounds.  The results are nothing short of hilarious.

It was a productive day, photographically.  We got a portrait for The Wedding Wall out of it, a couple of pictures to hang on our own wall that depict us in all our wedded glory, and then we got a stack of dark, grainy prints that depict us as we really were that day: imperfect, goofy, and more than a little in love.  Enjoy!