A wedding at the Oasis overlooking Lake Travis at sunset is a recipe for beautiful, picturesque skies, vistas and views of the lake. Jessica and Roddy’s wedding was held against this beautiful background along with the wonderful nooks and crannies for shooting around the Oasis itself as you can see from the images below. The cake was a big hit. It was a “fairy tale” cake complete with castle on the top. The grooms cake came with a frog, which of course, is now Roddy the prince after the magic kiss of Princess Jessica.
Jessica and Roddy came to me over a year ago having been referred to me by Emily and Spencer Chow. Emily works at Griffiths Animal Hospital where we take Petey, our lovable Yorkie. Spencer is an Austin policeman. As Spencer tells the story, when Jessica and Roddy were visiting, they loved Emily and Spencer’s Guest Book we had made from their engagement shoot. To which Spencer replied, “Well then wait ’til you see our Album!” I guess that sold Jessica and Roddy. This story makes a point that I believe is important. Invest in an Album. Most of my clients do invest in Albums as they often come to Patrick Motola Photography specifically for that reason. In every case when I visit their home, they have their Guest Book (with all the yearbook style messages left by their guests) and their Album visibly displayed in their living rooms. They all comment on how proud they are of their album and how much fun they have showing their friends and reliving the memories of their Wedding Day.
Another point to be made about this wedding is the need for an experienced, capable photographer (in our case a PPA Certified Professional Photographer). While the views are beautiful, you are shooting directly into a setting sun. Done properly, you can use this to create spectacular images. If you don’t have the right skills, you will get very poor images. For those who care to know more, the key is to get enough light on the subjects to counter / balance the light of the sun using off camera flash (in this case, 3 of them). In addition, you must be careful about getting flare from the sun directly hitting your lens. For some shots, we want to see the sun or a kiss of light from the sun in which case we are OK with some flare that we leave in for creative purposes or can remove in postprocessing.
My congratulations to Jessica and Roddy! They were so much fun to work with. You can click here if you would like to see their engagement images.
