In our original wedding budget, we had about $350 set aside for photography and hadn’t even considered a videographer. Today, almost six months after our wedding, those two aspects are the most important to me. In retrospect, I would have cut our guest list in half to take the photography and videography seriously in our budget. Luckily, we have amazing friends and family that came to the rescue to give us these treasured mementos.

*I’d like to note that none of my vendor write-ups come with any perks for me. I write it like I see it and my praises and complaints are genuine.*

I blogged about losing our photography “friendor” and about how my brother-in-law offered to take her place. When I found out 3 days before the wedding that my brother-in-law would probably get called into work and wouldn’t be able to make it, I was almost not surprised. I mean, I think I probably cried about it eventually when the panic really set in, but at first, I just sat there. I was in a “wedding zen” mode those last few days and the news just kind of glided right over me. I think it took until later that night or the next morning for me to realize, “Sh**. I need a photographer. And I need one this weekend.”

At our place of work, we have a creative department. In that department is a man who is indeed creative. He’s great at his job as a graphic and web designer/user interface expert and is also a musician and photographer on the side (and probably has other talents of which I am not aware). He had done some photography for a client at work and I remembered thinking how great of a job he did. So naturally, I thought to ask him to please, please, please be our photographer. Please. In 3 days. Of course, I had no backup plan if he happened to have plans for the weekend already. It was a shot in the dark but the only thing I could think of as a viable alternative.

I lucked out. He made himself available on EXTREMELY short notice and gave us an amazing price for shooting the whole day. It was definitely an unexpected cost in our budget, but ended up being well worth it. (You can’t plan for everything, right?) He stuck it out through the wind and annoying mist/rain that we had going on that morning and managed to get some great shots through all of our heavy squinting and visible hostility towards Mother Nature.

We had to get at least one at “our spot” – Adler Planetarium.

And now my hair is ruined. Awesome.

We had two “photo locations” lists titled: “Nice Weather” and “🙁”. We had to use the latter. We stopped by Union Station and the Cultural Center. We stopped by the Rookery, but there was a private wedding in there already (lucky kids). The photos turned out great even though we had to work through the less-than-desirable lighting in those buildings and dreary weather.

Checking our lists.

Some of his great work:

(In our office, where we met.)

Thanks, Jon! We love our photos! (visit him here!)

I will post our video information tomorrow – this post got long fast. Cheers!