the photographer

so we finally nailed down a photographer! photography is pretty important to both of us so we really wanted to nail this down as a top priority. Also a lot of photographers start booking a year in advance, just like venues.

once again i had collected and got together an extensive list (70+ photographers!). some i had seen their work in blogs and some on yelp. i contacted all of them or most of them through email because their rates are not posted online and then began to eliminate them by price. Then i went back through the list again and went to the photographer's blog to see if i still connected with their style. i preferred photos with great uses of natural light, that were softer and lighter. then stephen went in and did the same thing. he preferred images that were not processed as much. after that we only had a handful we actually wanted to interview:
1. allyson wiley
2. anna and michael costa
3. bret cole
4. colson griffith
5. leila brewster
6. stephen hughes

one was immediately eliminated because she never contacted us after she went on vacation. i actually didnt even remember until just right now. of the five left, 2 were film photographers. I had actually sort of fallen in love with film photography. they produce images that are softer and lighter. two were not local so we tried to facetime which actually worked pretty well! google video however failed so one we only got to chat with on the phone. we eliminated one because she seemed a bit young, with less experience. we eliminated another because the albums he brought had some images that didnt seem good to us.

we narrowed down to two that we really thought hard about: one was film and the other digital. i think in the end we went with someone who was laidback, had enough experience, whose images were consistent, and who we could expect a level of quality we were comfortable with. he's also shot at our venue before so that was a plus. we had to think about whether we wanted a few great, awesome, "wow" images with some that were not focused properly or whether we wanted all our images to be good. in the end we decided with the latter.

the venue

so it took us a good couple months to nail down a venue. i think we looked at about 20 venues if not more. the places were compiled from blogs and pictures I had seen or even here comes the guide. there were several things we knew:
1. we wanted to get married nearby. no destination wedding. and anything that was more than an hour's drive was kind of out of the question. this eliminated tahoe, carmel or monterey but included napa, sonoma, healdsurg, sf, marin etc i was a bit opposed to east bay and also peninsula but we ended up in peninsula
2. we wanted to get married outside.
3. we wanted to get married next summer/fall
4. we wanted the party to go past 10 or 11pm

there were also some things that i thought i really wanted but eventually fell off the list. I thought i wanted to get married under a big old oak tree. i know it sounds silly, but the pictures ive seen where the ceremony takes place under an oak tree struck a cord with me. i loved it. another thing i thought i wanted was a big barn.
The excel i kept of all the venues had about 100 places listed. we eliminated a bunch right from the getgo due to high site fees. in retrospect, the rate isnt just dependent on the site fee though that is a big part of it. but the main thing is the cost per person for food and alcohol. even though the site we ended up with was closer to the higher end of our site fee threshold, the food and beverage was a lot lower than some places we had looked at. that brought the grand total down quite a bit.

at one point we thought we wanted a hotel. hotels can be very expensive because you do everything through them. we thought that people could stay with us especially our out of town family members and friends which made up for about half of the guest count.

we actually visited the calistoga hotels twice thinking that we would go with one of them but the price was just too much. so then we began to look in the peninsula too. mainly palo alto. once we saw mountain terrace it was hard to look at anything else. we were comfortable with the price. the venue was beautiful. we could stay at a nearby hotel/resort. everything just seemed to fit.