Weddingbee Blog

Mr. Lace and I looked high and low for a great, yet budget-friendly photographer. After looking through recommendations of friends, combing through wedding websites and reading and following blogs, I was ready to give up and just settle for a DECENT photographer, despite the fact that many of our married friends said to make sure we got a good photographer no matter the cost. Either the photographers were phenomenal and several thousand dollars over budget or way under budget with pictures that looked like they came out of a point and shoot digital camera.

One night, I buckled down and Googled “Orange County Wedding Photographer”. Of course, Google came up with results! I decided I was going to look through as many pages as I could. I was on page 24 of my Google search before I found a website that was labeled “Orange County Wedding Photographer”. I clicked and found this. I immediately loved her writing style and thought that she sounded like a really interesting person. As I looked through her photos, I had that “this is the one” moment (that I failed to have with my wedding dress, but I do hear that a small percentage of brides don’t really have that big “this is it” moment). She had some general guidelines on pricing so I emailed her and crossed my fingers. Later that day, Hanssie e-mailed me back with prices that perfectly fit our budget.
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I did a lot of research when trying to pick out places to take engagement photos. I went back to all potential photographer websites and combed through their engagement sessions. I asked all of our friends who were married and had taken photos already. It was overwhelming. You only have a few hours with your photographer so you want to make it count! So, here’s how we planned our engagement photo session. It turned out to take a lot more preparation than I thought.

Mr. L and I first talked about what we did NOT want for our engagement photos. We did not want to wear khakis and white shirts and take pictures on the beach. Okay, so that’s really the only thing we didn’t want.

Then we talked about what we DID want.

1. We wanted interesting backgrounds. We’re not terribly photogenic people so we thought that if the backgrounds were interesting, it might take some of the attention off of us.
2. We wanted to use some of our photos at our wedding, for our guestbook (possibly) and on our website.
3. We wanted our clothes, style and location to reflect our styles. On the one hand, we’re young, casual and stylin’ and on the other, we’re refined and sophisticated.

So my suggestions are:
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Mr. Lace and I went to Vegas over Labor Day weekend to visit his family and relax. We take any chance we get to go to Vegas since it’s so close, but we love going there to visit family, go swimming and eat (buffets are our specialty).

In August, Mr. Lace mentioned going to Vegas during Labor Day weekend and I was all for it, but then he didn’t bring it up at all after that. A few days before Labor Day weekend, I was the one who had to ask him if he still wanted to go. He nonchalantly left it up to me. I thought it was a bit strange that he didn’t jump at the chance to go, but didn’t think much about it. We arrived on Saturday and spent the day with his family. His sister mentioned that she got free tickets to go to the top of the Eiffel Tower at Paris. I was excited because I didn’t know you could go to the top and thought that there’d be a nice view. However, Mr. Lace seemed unenthused. He said that when he went to Paris with his friends, they didn’t even go to the top of the real Eiffel Tower. I wanted to go, but I didn’t want to go if he was so uninterested in the excursion. However, on the last night after dinner, Mr. Lace’s sister handed me the tickets. I suggested that she and her boyfriend use them because Mr. Lace didn’t seem like he wanted to go, but she encouraged us to use them anyway. We began walking down the strip and the whole time Mr. Lace was playing it off like he didn’t want to go, saying things like, “How far is it? Isn’t Paris really far down?” and “Are you sure you guys want to walk all the way down to Paris?” His sister kept trucking on, so I followed.
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Hello hive! I am so excited to have been chosen to be a BEE! I wavered back and forth before applying, wondering if my ideas were good enough, if my writing style would be well-received, but I finally took the plunge and here I am. I am unbelievably excited to be able to share my thoughts, ideas and plans with you!

I’m an elementary school teacher in California. I really love teaching because of the a-ha! moments when they go from “this is too hard,” to “this is so easy!” I also love the relationships I get to build with my students and being able to care for and encourage them. I get to see a microcosm of the world in my classroom every day. In my spare time, I love reading. I like all kinds of books, but my favorites seem to be children’s literature and period pieces. In addition to that, I love doing crafts, mainly paper, but crafts in general. I have a love/hate relationship with scrapbooking. I love the concept behind each page and the end product, but I hate that it takes so much time and at the end of it, I have about six zillion scraps leftover! Mr. Lace and I LOVE trying new restaurants and food. I recently became a Yelper for the purpose of making my voice heard on all the awesome and not-so-awesome restaurants in LA and the OC.

Mr. Lace and I were friends for 8 years before we began dating. That’s not to say I didn’t have a huge crush on him along the way.
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