Alexandra Roberts :: Boston Wedding Photographer :: Boston, MA

Chantel & Mikey – McMenamins Grand Lodge, Forest Grove, Oregon

Alexandra — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 01:16:57 +0000

Meet Chantel and Mikey. I had the pleasure of photographing this wedding in Oregon last month. I would love to do more weddings in Oregon *wink wink*

These two were married at McMenamins Grand lodge. McMenamins in Oregon is hard for me to explain and please forgive me if I don’t have it all correct! They are breweries, and it seems as though they all used to be something freaky before they became a McMenamins. This one in Forest Grove was an old Masonic Lodge, turned nursing home, now a brewery/resort. The one in Edgefield used to be an insane asylum, and one of them in Portland used to be an elementary school. The decor matches the building’s history, which is why I included a few shots of the decor, it was so interesting. Check out those water pipes! Anyway, onto Chantel & Mike! These two have been together for 7 years, they taught english in South Korea together for a year while exploring other parts of Asia, so they incorporated a little bit of Asian flair in their decor. They got their rings on etsy, you know how I am about trees, love these rings! (Chantel is an esty lover just like myself!) I hope you enjoy the photos!

Sidenote, Mikey is in the girl’s room on the phone calling his friend to ask him to stop by their house (an hour away in PDX) and pick up the marriage license which he forgot

The charm on Chantel’s bouquet is of her best friend Melissa and her daughter who weren’t able to make it to the wedding.

Pre-wedding thoughts

Alexandra — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 01:57:09 +0000

I always wonder what is running through my couple’s heads in the midst of everything. Something in Chantel’s eyes tell us that she’s got something on her mind. Maybe the excitement of marrying her best friend in a few short moments? Maybe it’s curiosity about where the marriage certificate is. Whatever it is, we’ll never know and that doesn’t matter. This is what I love about photography.

Recently

Alexandra — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 14:55:25 +0000

Hi all. Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while, I know you are always anxiously waiting my next post, ha! I have been busy, to say the least. I just wanted to give you a preview of what will be making it’s way to the blog soon since I haven’t had the time to make full blog posts for a while. As I think most of you know, I have a day job as a web developer and due to a recent project that I have been on where I had to be at the office for 12+ hours a day for a month and a half, I have had very little time to blog. It’s most important to me to get images to my clients first, blog second. Here is a preview of what I have been up to lately:

First, a lovely back yard wedding in Winterport, Maine for Audrey & Homer.

An e-shoot for Sarah & Karl in the fens

A super-silly e-shoot in the North End with Michael & Jeffery:

My very first wedding in Oregon! This one is at McMenamins Grand Lodge in Forest Grove for Chantel & Mike:

I just love everyone in the background cheering them on!

A wedding in a barn in Holliston, Ma for Linda & Steve:

I was away in Oregon for a week for the wedding and something else happened. Danny and I are engaged!
This is where he did it, not bad eh? (I took this the day after, because the day he did it the weather was overcast, you’ll see in the next photo) I have received many comments on my ring and people wanting to see photographs of it. Here is a link to jeweler Heather Wang’s page about it: My e-ring. I think it’s the coolest piece of jewelry ever made, but then again, I think that about every one of her pieces!

Thank you for taking the time to read this, I have two more weddings this weekend and those will be added to the queue! I super miss blogging my shoots but hopefully once things relax a little, I will have time once again! xoxoxo

Ellen & Roger :: Married – Springstep Yoga Studio – Boston Wedding Photographer

Alexandra — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:10:02 +0000

I am so excited to be blogging this wedding right now. Ellen and Roger are a couple unlike any other I’ve met and I consider myself so lucky to have been a part of their day. You might remember their engagement session from a couple months ago at the Arboretum. They are acrobats, like Cirque De Soleil style. Guests at this wedding were given their very own mini cirque de soleil performance, and yes, I have seen it live before – this was better! If there is one thing I love most about being a photographer, its that I get to watch people in their element. There is something really special about watching people do exactly what they were meant to do. It’s more than a performance, it’s a beautiful connection that people have with what they are passionate about, and every person in this room was having that with each other. It was amazing to watch! A special thank you to Meredith Perdue of & Unlimited for supplying me with another set of photographic arms and gorgeous images! Ellen & Roger, thank you so much for letting me be part of your day!

Ellen’s mother made her dress. Ellen told her that she would need a “tear away” dress for their first dance, and that is exactly what her mother made her!

A few details!

First dance dress tear away! Check the end of this post for a video link to the real thing!

This is a snap of each performer, they’re all friends!

I have to pause a minute and say a little something about the band. They are called Emperor Norton’s Stationary Marching Band. Also friends of Ellen and Roger’s, they are a 12 (I think!) piece band and I think I listened to their music non-stop for two weeks after this wedding. They are awesome and they play around Boston/Cambridge regularly. Go give them a listen, they’re wicked fun! Oh, and they play in the middle of the dance floor throughout the night, how awesome!

As the night was winding down, Ellen and Roger were making their way outside and the band followed outside playing the entire time, it was quite a sight!

Ellen and Roger, you have such wonderful friends and family, if only everyone can be so lucky. Oh! go watch their first dance video, NOW!

xoxo

Denisse + Anthony: Married – Boston Wedding Photographer

Alexandra — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 02:16:22 +0000

I introduce you to Denisse & Anthony. They were married at Our Lady Help in Newton and their reception followed at the Hyatt in Cambridge on Memorial Drive. The Hyatt has great floor to ceiling windows with the gorgeous Boston skyline in full view! I had never shot here, but I am stoked because I have another wedding here later in the year. Their wedding had a beachy theme – turquoise with pink and orange accents. I loved that they had a candy bar for people to fill little bags up with treats to take on the road after.

What I found funny was everything was going as expected and about an hour after the reception started they busted out into “la hora loca”, which is a Peruvian tradition and I must say, it was CRAZY! You’ll see.

Classic Boston weather being Bostony, hehe :

La hora loca begins!

Thank you for visiting!

Ben & Scott :: Married at the Commander’s Mansion! – Boston Wedding Photographer

Alexandra — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 03:21:18 +0000

Hello hello! Things have been crazy busy over here as of late, and I am so excited to be able to put up Ben & Scott’s wedding photographs on the blog! You may recognize them from their engagement session with me that I put up on the blog a few weeks ago. I was so pumped to see that they had “The Calder” as one of their signature cocktails during their reception! This was my kind of wedding, it was absolutely perfect in my eyes! They had a small intimate ceremony by the gorgeous Smoke Tree behind the Commander’s Mansion in Watertown. After that there was a long cocktail hour before the sit down meal catered by Forklift Catering. People danced, they drank, they hugged and kissed. I loved watching every moment of it! Enough of my blabbering, here are the photos!

That awesome looking brain-like flower is called a cockscomb, my new favorite!

I love that Scott tied Ben’s tie for him. They’re so adorable!

You know me, I can’t even tell you how many times my viewfinder got fogged up during this wedding!

Ben & Scott had a lot of friends and family who wanted to send them well wishes during the ceremony.

Nicole & David, the Best Lady and Best Man congratulating each other on their awesome bestie duties and a job well done!

Scott loved setting up funny formals where everyone is looking in another direction, it was hilarious! Just the men in shades for this one:

As mentioned in their engagement shoot post, they collect typewriters. So instead of the typical guestbook, they had stationary with their initials on the top loaded up into this old typewriter for people to leave notes on. I thought that was a fantastic idea!

Instead of the traditional wedding cake, Ben & Scott decided to make their own wedding cakes! These were delicious carrot cakes, from scratch! They had about 20 pints of Ben & Jerry’s for the guests to choose from to go with their cake.

I think my couples do the best posed shots! I think it helps to not really be “into them” to get some really hilarious ones.

Ben & Scott, thank you so much for allowing me the pleasure of photographing your wedding.

xoxo

Janice + Chris :: A Wedding in Tuscany pt 4

Alexandra — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 03:38:37 +0000

Hello hello! Thank you for coming back for part 4 of the Tuscany wedding extravaganza! I’ll have to say, I am a little sad that this is my last Italy post. I loved going through these images every night (There were many thousands!) picking out the best ones and seeing Janice and Chris every day! Not to mention all of your thoughts as well :-p I’ll miss looking at your faces J & C, but I’m sure I’ll see you soon.

Onto our day after shoot in Lucca!

Yahoo! I hope you enjoyed these images! We had such a blast the day after the wedding and it was around 80 degrees outside that day, these two are troopers. We also had Nicole and Mike assist with the shoot because I had a few polaroids with me and they helped me swap out film packs

xoxo

Janice + Chris :: A Wedding in Tuscany pt 3

Alexandra — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 02:42:04 +0000

Hello all! Thank you so much for coming back to view part 3 of 4 of this Tuscan wedding adventure! I left off right at the end of the ceremony last time and am continuing to the reception here. Tomorrow will be part 4 and that is our day after shoot in Lucca! Carousels, candy, vespas, big cathedrals, and gorgeous Lucca wall shots with the fully dressed bride and groom await!

After the ceremony, we went down the hill to a winery to see if we could take a couple shots by the vines. We knew we would have the day after shoot all dressed up, so we didn’t go crazy with shots of Janice + Chris the day of their wedding. They had an insane 6 course dinner to get to!

After that tiny bit of time at the winery, we headed back up to the villa where everyone was waiting with prosecco!

Toasts!

Shot of the awesome 3 piece band who stayed all night and I promise these are the last shots of Marco! You might recognize him from the first post because he was the man who taught us how to make pasta!

This is a photo of every single guest who attended.

No reception is complete without a little dancing! Oh! The last photo in this little set was taken by Chris, you can see that I am in it! (Janice is looking right at me )

Janice + Chris : A Wedding in Tuscany

Alexandra — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 00:49:52 +0000

Welcome to part 2 of the wedding in Italy! Today is the wedding day and we start off by going to Lucca town hall. Before you can legally be married in Italy and for it to look legit in the US, you must first be married in “the eyes of Italy”. We headed over to the beautiful town hall for the simple ceremony with Janice and Chris’ two witnesses, Sally and Steve.

First an outfit shot. Janice and Chris have such great style, I kept wanting to get outfit shots of them, here is the one from the wedding day!

^ yay, married! ^ But once we got back to the Villa it was “shhh shhh don’t tell anyone!”
Janice and Chris know me well enough by now that when there is a sweet tree to be seen, they pose next to it for me! xoxo

Prosecco toast!

Their rings are too sweet. Janice’s is obviously gorgeous with the giant sapphire in the middle but if you look carefully you will see that they are engraved on the inside. The couple met at Sound Bites in Ball Square, anyone from around here knows that Sound Bites has *the best* pancakes around, and their fried mashed potatoes, oh ma gah. Mango Banana were the pancakes Janice was eating and Chocolate Coconut was Chris’ dish. So cute!

I am so in love with Janice’s dress, I love the off-white silk and the one shoulder strap. You don’t see too many dresses with the one shoulder these days.

The entire time in Italy, no occasion (or should I say hour?) went by without a bottle of prosecco nearby! You’ll notice a blue theme all around this wedding. Another thing that I loved was that all the guests wore blue. There group was small enough where that was something that was easy to achieve and it was a nice touch that Janice threw into the mix. Everyone looked so great together.

There was not one dry eye in the group. Even my viewfinder was fogging up. Because everyone got so close during the week, emotions overflowed as we listened to Janice and Chris exchange heartfelt vows that they wrote to each other.

Thank you for stopping by and taking a look! I think I will be making this a 4 parter, after all. Don’t forget to come back and see our day after shoot (Janice and Chris both in wedding gear!) around Lucca!

xoxo

Janice and Chris lived their dream by getting married in Italy

Alexandra — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 02:42:39 +0000

Hello, all! The last couple of weeks have been insane over here. As a lot of you probably know, I was asked by this sweet couple to come to Italy with them and photograph their wedding. I have a lot to say about the experience, but I’ll keep it short and sweet. I met Chris and Janice as they were looking for a photographer to bring on this crazy trip. We instantly connected on many levels. Janice likes to tell the story about how she hugged me when we met up at a little coffee shop in Winter Hill and how I might have thought that was weird since we had only just met, but I wanted to hug her too! I got the phone call that they were picking me 3 days after we had met and I was just floored. Not only was I excited to go to Italy for a week, but I knew that we were going to be friends for a really long time. Since we were going to be spending a week in a house together, we made a point to hang out a few times just to get to know each other better. They had Danny and me over for dinner/game night many times after that. I was even invited to her bachelorette party, which totally made me cry. I love these two, they are some of the most special people I have ever met and I look forward to more fun times that we will have together.

The following images are from the first three or so days of the trip and part 1 of I am guessing 3 part series of this wedding in Tuscany. Enjoy.

I’m going to start out by showing you where we stayed. Quite the dump, eh? I think Chris’s mum’s expression says it all:

Most evenings were spent poolside, overlooking the gorgeous hills where we were surrounded by wineries. This came in handy when we ran out of wine and brought our bottles to be refilled for 2 euro each (Thanks, Kevin!)

A few details from the villa…

The second day we were there, we went into Lucca just to hang around and unwind. Lucca is surrounded by a huge wall that is really fun to ride bikes around (so I hear!). A few guests spent the day riding around Lucca while we ran a few errands and Janice carted more people back to the villa as they arrived in Italy.

Day three, we had to run to Florence to go to the US consulate and meet up with Jackie, the wedding planner (who, by the way, if any of you are thinking about getting married in Italy, contact her. She was our translator, bestie, and comic relief. Nothing would have been accomplished without her!). I of course got yelled at for having a camera within 2 miles of the consulate. =D

Janice hired a chef to come in and teach everyone how to make pasta from scratch, how fab is she? Marco, who was also the chef for the 6 course wedding dinner, is unbelievable. The food he created for everyone was just incredible! He studied English in Australia which means he has an Australian/Italian accent. Yeah, just try to imagine that one for a sec, knees melt? I thought so.

Thank you for looking at part 1 of this crazy adventure. Next up is the wedding day!

xoxo