Weddingbee Blog

While we were in Syracuse, NY (where our wedding is going to be) doing a bunch of wedding-related things last week, we scheduled an engagement photo session with our fabulous photographer, Tim Forbes. He is based in Ontario, but he was shooting a wedding in Rochester, NY that Saturday and he was able to squeeze us in the night before.

So now I will share with you some of the fruits of our rather interesting photo session (see the end of this entry for elaboration). Overall, I’m very happy with the results and now I’m even more excited about the wedding pictures! I must point out that I’m a terrible subject to photograph. I always clam up in front of the camera and make a stupid face or have my eyes half closed. The only things about these pics that I’m less than thrilled about are my own fault. Like my hair is total freaking mess. You would think that I could’ve invested in some hairspray… ugh! And I couldn’t remember which side of my grill was my “good side,” and my bad side is AWFUL - especially in high resolution. I also had some major bags under my eyes (which I took the liberty of photoshopping out) and my big Irish ears are sticking out all over the place. Mr. Radish, on the other hand, is looking pretty dapper in most of these shots. If we ever have kids, let’s hope they inherit his photogenes.

Okay, so what makes these engagement photos a little bit odd is that they were all taken in a graveyard. Or, at least I would assume that is odd but for all I know people do it all the time.

You see, our photographer Tim is Canadian, and therefore he is not too familiar with the Syracuse area. He asked me if I minded finding a location for the shoot, but I’m not actually from Syracuse either and I couldn’t think of anything good off the top of my head. I looked around online and asked for some recommendations on the knot and such. I had a hard time finding anything that wasn’t a rose garden (and no offense if you like that sort of thing… it’s just not our gig) or some boring, run-of-the mill kind of place. Eventually, I came across the Oakwood Cemetery, which is right next to the Syracuse University campus. It looked really cool from the pictures I found online, and it is not hard to get to from the highway. I know it sounds very weird and morbid, but there are a lot of beautiful old buildings on the periphery of the cemetery that don’t have dead people in them… just some pretty old architecture. From what I’m told, it is a very popular spot for local wedding photographers. Seriously! Here are some of the pictures that I had found that led me to think this was a good idea.

However, being the slackish little radishes that we are, we never actually went to the cemetery beforehand to scout out the exact location of these particular buildings/spots. We just got there right on time for our pictures and had Tim meet us at the main entrance. Well… guess what? This damn cemetery was HUGE and we never found the right spot. Our shoot was scheduled for 8pm, so we didn’t have a lot of daylight to waste and after a bit of running around looking for the buildings, Tim decided we better just find whatever spots we could and get to it. He wanted to take advantage of the sunlight while he still could.

So, in the end, we totally ended up having our engagement pictures taken in the actual cemetery, surrounded by headstones and mausoleums… and dead people, of course. Luckily, we didn’t run into any zombie trouble and Tim did a really awesome job of somehow concealing the fact that we were surrounded by rotting corpses throughout the whole shoot. We pretty much felt like morons about our blooper. I just hope the photographer wasn’t totally annoyed by our flakiness. He was actually a really good sport about it but I’m sure he thinks we are total weirdos. I’m not sure that we could prove him wrong.

Anyway, I hope this will mean any kind of bad juju for us.