Congratulations to the eight Tacoma-area wedding venues that made the just-announced 2012 roster of Tacoma’s Top Wedding Venues (www.tacomaweddingvenues.com): Union Station, Thornewood Castle, Museum of Glass, Chambers Bay Golf Course, Lakewold Gardens, Washington State History Museum, Hotel Murano — all of which were also on the inaugural 2011 roster — and our new member, the Greater Tacoma Convention and Trade Center! Two venues on the 2011 roster did not make it this year.

The Tacoma’s Top Wedding Venues website has been updated with highlights from a total of 12 new weddings photographed by Wallflower Photography in 2011, half of which are in the Thornewood Castle gallery. As we reported earlier, it was a banner year for us at Thornewood!

In addition, the first six of these eight venues now have separate, dedicated websites that show off even more photos from these weddings. Links from the gallery pages of these venues will take you to these dedicated websites, which share the same framework and functionality as the TTWV site. Direct links are:

Chambers Bay Weddings: www.chambersbaywedding.com
Lakewold Gardens Weddings: www.lakewoldgardenswedding.com
Museum of Glass Weddings: www.museumofglasswedding.com
Thornewood Castle Weddings: www.thornewoodcastlewedding.com
Tacoma Union Station Weddings: www.tacomaunionstationwedding.com
Washington State History Museum Weddings: www.wastatehistorymuseumwedding.com

Tacoma’s Top Wedding Venues, and the dedicated venue websites associated with it, all represent a massive effort to help our favorite hometown wedding venues better market themselves to prospective brides. If you’re engaged and looking for somewhere in the Tacoma area to hold your wedding, there’s no better place to start than Tacoma’s Top Wedding Venues, where you can see highlights of real weddings held at some truly spectacular venues. If you’ve already booked one of these venues for your wedding, turn to Tacoma’s Top Wedding Venues for ideas and inspiration, based on what others have done at your venue before.

We love photographing weddings at these eight venues, and as you’ll see in these photos, we’re quite good in each of them. Of course, it’s our hope that Tacoma’s Top Wedding Venues will also expose more engaged couples to Wallflower Photography’s award-winning wedding photography,and that after they book their wedding venue (whether it’s a TTWV member or not), they’ll contact us next.

Congrats again to the good people in charge of weddings at Union Station, Thornewood Castle, Museum of Glass, Chambers Bay Golf Course, Lakewold Gardens, Washington State History Museum, Hotel Murano, and the Greater Tacoma Convention and Trade Center. Membership in Tacoma’s Top Wedding Venues is exclusive, based solely on performance and not for sale like all the other wedding websites out there, so your inclusion is truly something to be proud of!

Thank-you sign portraits have sure been popular this year! Never heard of them? Several of our recent brides and grooms have prepared signs in a variety of shapes, sizes, colors and fonts, all with the words “THANK YOU” (and sometimes more). We’re happy to dedicate a few extra minutes to photographing them holding those signs, and they later use these photos for their thank-you cards. We even offer beautiful cards in all sorts of formats and shapes that are way nicer than what non-professional photographers have access to purchase online.

Here are thank-you sign portraits from five different couples (in order of appearance): Julia and Miguel Angel, Chrissie and Austin (wedding recap coming soon), Heidi and Adam, Hillary and DB (from 2007!), and Jessie and TJ. You’ll find more than one photo for each couple, and these are just our favorites — we like to give our clients a few options to choose from!

Julia and Miguel win the award for most creative thank-you sign, and bonus points for going bilingual, which makes sense when you know that the two met and live in Spain. Our only challenge here was that it was a windy day on the bluff at Chambers Bay Golf Course, and some of those letters liked to flip out of position. The silver lining was the way the gusts played with Julia’s long veil! The photo at the top of this post was the keeper, but these alternate photos below are pretty nice, too.

Chrissie and Austin just got married last month at Chapel at Echo Bay, and being that it was raining while we took these photos, the two are actually standing just inside the French doors at the back of the chapel. With careful framing, we were able to hide that fact pretty well!

Heidi and Adam were fortunate to have access to a sweet boat — belonging to Adam’s dad — docked right next to their wedding venue, the Museum of Glass. We had fun shooting a few portraits of them on the boat, with and without their thank-you sign!

These two portraits with Hillary and DB are the oldest here, dating from their Salty’s at Alki wedding in March 2007. I suppose that makes them pioneers of the thank-you sign portrait!

Last, we have thank-you sign portraits with Jessie and TJ in front of the towering Orizon sculpture outside Hotel Murano … but wait, where are the words? Never fear, these two decided to add the text to their blank sign later with photo editing software. We can offer these services as well.

While it’s pretty easy to include thank-you sign portraits, we do have one important tip. It’s no fun lugging signs around with us on a mid-wedding-day portrait shoot, so these signs need to be planted in a location in close proximity to both us and a photogenic backdrop. After a few minutes of photography, we’ll need to be able to leave the signs behind as we move on. We’re always happy to consult on where good locations would be, but we’ll leave the sign creation up to our clients!

Every year we book a few weddings of engaged couples who are getting married in our area but currently live far away. Julia and Miguel Angel trumped them all by being our first to plan their wedding from a different continent! Julia, who grew up in University Place, met her groom-to-be in Miguel’s hometown of Almonte, Spain, where she held a temporary teaching position. They got married there in a small ceremony, but wanted to have a second wedding in Julia’s hometown so her friends and family could attend. Chambers Bay Golf Course proved to be the perfect venue for their Spanish-flavored wedding day.

Julia and Miguel stuck with the 6 hours of photography in our starter package, and chose to skew our time with them toward the reception end of their wedding day, so we skipped getting-ready photos altogether and launched right in with portraits in the Central Meadow. We started with the farthest point — the beach, accessible via a curvy new pedestrian bridge over the existing railroad tracks. Then we meandered our way back to the parking lot, where we met their wedding party for portraits and to kick around a soccer ball.

Historically, the Chambers Bay property was a sand and gravel mine with a great view. When famed golf course architect Robert Trent Jones II designed Chambers Bay, he left several “ancient ruins” from the site’s mining era that are very easy to reach — even in high heels.

Wind is common down on the Central Meadow, and I love this last portrait of Julia and Miguel for the kites soaring overhead. Also, check out Julia’s bouquet, which had part of her grandmother’s beaded wedding veil wound around its base.

On my way back to the car, I snapped this photo of the Chambers Bay clubhouse (at left) and the huge, plush tent (at right) where wedding receptions and rainy-day ceremonies take place. The patio between the two buildings was the site of today’s wedding ceremony.

Instead of attaching their wedding rings to a pillow for their ring bearer to carry into the ceremony, Julia and Miguel suspended theirs in a little moss-filled jar.

The sun was low in the sky as the wedding ceremony started, casting long shadows and giving us dramatic lighting. In one of the sweeter moments during the ceremony, Miguel spoke his vows in English, a language he’s been working hard to learn. Then, after their first kiss, they danced their way down the aisle, followed by their bridesmaids and groomsmen.

Following the ceremony, we shot a series of family portraits as colors bloomed in the sky behind us. We had to get a few final portraits with Julia and Miguel under that beautiful sky before moving on with the reception.

Since our last wedding at Chambers Bay, great swaths of billowing fabric have been hung from the ceiling of their huge tent, which really dresses the place up!

Given this was their second wedding, Julia and Miguel chose a fitting motto for it: “We do … again!” The phrase appeared in several places, including on the labels of these little bottles of Spanish olive oil, one of their wedding favors. Soccer fans will recognize the Real Madrid logo on the groom’s cake. The topper on the bride’s cake were two figurines that first graced Julia’s grandmother and granfather’s wedding cake!

You don’t get a much prettier background to the wedding toasts as we had. I love how the sky is a bit darker behind each subsequent toaster. There’s no better sunset venue than Chambers Bay in the South Sound.

The skies were nearly dark by the time Julia and Miguel fed each other pieces of cake.

There are a few great moments from Julia and Miguel’s wedding day that I’ve left out of this post, because I want to feature them more prominently in Focal Point posts. Check back again soon to learn more about dove and butterfly releases!

It’s always a proud moment for us to see photos from our weddings featured in wedding magazines. In the latest issue of South Sound Wedding & Event, we’re feeling doubly proud! Two of the nine featured weddings are Wallflower brides and grooms.

First up is Julia and Miguel Angel’s summer wedding at Chambers Bay Golf Course:
(if you want to read the stories, enlarge the photos by clicking them)

You might recognize that photo of the bride, groom and wedding party playing soccer from my previous blog post, and you’ll be seeing a lot more of them on this blog soon.

Then, a bit later in the magazine, is a feature on Beth and Peter’s November wedding at Church of St. Patrick, Point Defiance Park and Tacoma Yacht Club:

I’m glad to see that Laura’s award-winning photo of their Rolls Royce driving on a rainy Five Mile Drive in Point Defiance Park made the cut!

Thanks to both of these couples for planning such beautiful and interesting weddings that our photos caught the eye of the magazine publisher! And hey, while we’re on the subject, the publisher of South Sound Wedding & Event magazine is putting on Love Struck, a unique and selective wedding show, on Feb. 17-18 at the McGavick Event Center, located at Clover Park Technical College in Lakewood. They decided to ditch the traditional wedding show format and instead provide a more intimate way for brides-to-be to browse décor displays and ideas. I think it’s going to be pretty sweet. We’ll be exhibiting at the show, and hope to see you there!

What a funny sight this must have been to everyone enjoying a beautiful summer’s day in the Central Meadow of Chambers Bay! Soccer brought Julia and Miguel Angel together, so it was perfectly fitting that they played a quick game of kick-the-ball with their wedding party. We just shot away.

Come back in a few days to see our announcement of some good news on the publications front, and then early next week for a recap of Julia and Miguel Angel’s wedding day!