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Ayesha + Mansoor | Wedding

Ayesha is a good friend of my wife and they have known each other for a long time now. She and Mansoor are also best friends with Sophia and Adnan, whose wedding I shot about a month ago. We were very happy when she came to us about her wedding photography needs because she is a totally fabulous person to work with.

This wedding, like the other Southeast Asian weddings I've shown before, was a two day event. I've broken the post down in chronological order. The first day was the Mendhi (henna ceremony) which consisted of a dessert feeding ritual followed by dances performed by close friends and family. The second day was the actual wedding day and I've been asked to keep most of it and the couple's session private. Check it out:

Leanne + Mike | Couple's Session

As soon as I met Leanne and Mike, I picked up on the bond they have. It's pretty easy to actually - it shows itself in the way Mike makes her laugh and the way she looks at him after a smile. We went out to UNC where Leanne went to school a few years ago and spent the day hanging out around Franklin Street. I left the strobes at home and decided to shoot with ambient light. The day was cycling through cloudy and sunny and gave us a good mix of light quality.

Here are a few I have finished among the whole set:

Sana + Ibraheem | Wedding

As you can see, the menu system has been greatly improved - I spent about six hours trying to get it right. It's working fine in Firefox, Safari 3.x, Safari 4 beta, and Chrome - Internet Explorer is... well... EPIC FAIL.

Anyway, while coding, I was reminded by a couple of people about this wedding. Ibraheem was my very first roommate when I moved out on my own and he has been a very close friend for the past few years. He introduced me to coding, sushi, anime, Top Gear, Grey's Anatomy, House, Firefly, and a host of other entertaining things. When we first lived together, none of us really had the money to go out and buy a TV or to pay for cable. So, it was his job to find ways to stream all this media for free on our little monitors. He would also fix things. He just has a way of touching things - they just start to work. So, after watching Vanilla Sky, we named him Tech Support.

He got engaged a week before me... which was great. He got married two months before me... which was wonderful. He would watch episodes of 24 before me (even after we had a pact to watch it together - and this is when 24 used to be good)... not cool, at all.

Great friends are mirrors as they show you who you were, how far you have come, and where you have to go. They keep you honest in the hardest of times and hold you accountable to be the best. Ibraheem has been a great friend. As I get to know Sana more and as I see both of them together, it is easy for me to realize that these two are meant for each other. They truly are two wonderful people.

There are a lot of pictures, so here are some key moments from the first day of the wedding:

January + Jeff | Wedding

This past week was absolutely nuts. The day I was scheduled to shoot January's bridals outside, we got a tornado warning and had to stay in and take a few bridals inside her home. When I left her house, we got hit with a flash flood and my car got totaled after being almost fully submerged in water - all this two days before the wedding. Nonetheless, I was good to go for the wedding and had a nice time working with the families.

January is a law school graduate and is pursuing a career as a prosecutor. Jeff is a computer engineer and an absolute gentleman. January's mom is probably one of the most skilled ladies I've ever met - she made the whole dress (along with a lot of other things) by herself!

Shooting six hour western weddings starts to seem really easy after doing three day Pakistani/Indian wedding marathons. I actually didn't feel like collapsing when I got home. Here are some pictures I've just finished working on: