Some venues ask a photographer to bring energy to the day. JW Marriott Hill Country asks the opposite. It's a resort built for people who want to slow down, and that shapes how a wedding day unfolds here more than almost anything else about the property. We've now photographed two weddings on this property, each different in size and rhythm, and both shaped by that same unhurried quality.
Read MoreLa Cantera sits high above the Texas Hill Country, and that elevation shapes everything about how a wedding day unfolds there. We've now photographed two very different celebrations on this property, one a full evening celebration with sunset vows and golden hour portraits, the other a smaller gathering built around an outdoor dinner and quiet sunset light. Both days looked nothing alike. Both were unmistakably La Cantera.
Read MoreCouples who choose the Texas Hill Country for their wedding are usually looking for the same thing; somewhere that feels real. Not a backdrop, not a stage set, but a place with its own character that the wedding gets to inhabit. Camp Lucy's Vineyard is that kind of place, and it is one of the few venues in the Dripping Springs area where the setting does as much work as anything the couple brings to it.
Read MoreEmiliano and Sofia made the drive from Houston with a few nights in San Antonio ahead of them. They had restaurants to try, things to see, the kind of easy trip that gives a couple a getaway form the stresses of work and responsibilities. Emiliano had something else in mind for one of those mornings, and he had been thinking about it for a while.
The Japanese Tea Garden was going to play right into that plan.
Read MoreMost couples start searching for a San Antonio wedding photographer the same way, they open a browser, scroll through a few websites, look at some galleries, and quickly realize that nearly every photographer they find seems talented. The images are beautiful. The websites are polished. The reviews are glowing. And yet none of it tells them what they actually need to know before making a decision that will shape how they remember one of the most significant days of their lives.
Read MoreThere is a version of your wedding day that happens around you, and a version that happens to you. Most couples want the second one. They want to feel the weight of the morning, the stillness before the ceremony begins, the particular quality of a room full of people who love them. They want to remember it from the inside. After years of photographing weddings across San Antonio and the Texas Hill Country, we have come to believe that presence on your wedding day is not an accident. It is something worth thinking about, and worth protecting.
Read MoreCocktail hour has a way of ending before couples arrive at it. The ceremony finishes, portraits begin, and by the time everyone finds their way inside, the passed appetizers are gone and the best conversations already happened without them.
It's one of the most common things we hear about after a wedding, and as San Antonio wedding photographers, it's one of the most preventable.
Read MoreThere's a particular feeling you get at certain wedding receptions, where nothing is obviously wrong but everything is subtly, quietly right. The flowers aren't fighting the lighting. The music fills the room without filling the room, if that makes sense. Guests aren't checking their phones. You notice it as a photographer because you're always watching, always reading the temperature of a space, and when a room is working, it registers somewhere below conscious thought.
The PG Special Events Catering Open House had that feeling from the moment we walked in.
Read MoreThe property was recently purchased and rebranded to Petit Cowboy and we were invited to their open house. With a cocktail in one hand, camera in the other, cypress trees overhead we stepped inside to see the recent transformation.
It wasn't what we expected.
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