Logs, Lakes, and White Lace: A Wild Wedding Photo Shoot Worthy of my Wife

A firmly held belief Julie and I have is that if it is a second wedding for both the bride and the groom, it should be pretty simple.  Paying for a big wedding once in a life time is plenty. I’m just here to get hitched and not so much looking for a fancy party with swans and ice sculptures.  And so it was with Julie and my wedding.  We kept the venue simple and only invited our immediate family members.  We even told everyone not to bring gifts (Heck I was just glad the attendees of my first wedding didn’t demand their toasters and crockpots back after my divorce).  This gift embargo was largely followed, with a couple of pleasant exceptions. Julie’s sisters had chipped in together and surprised us with a photographer for the actual wedding, which we were just going to do without.  Good sisters.  Lest you think I am overly cheap, which I can be, I was going to do without photographs of the wedding in lieu of a post wedding adventure photography session. I guess both her siblings and I know how much Julie loves the ability of a picture to capture a moment, which should not be a surprise.  Chubby kids love the wedding cake, lonely single dudes love the garter toss, and exceedingly gorgeous brides love an equally beautiful wedding photo.

Now Julie had done some modeling in the past, wedding modeling even, and I had seen what she had done to that wedding dress.  She liked to get her hands dirty.   I believe she refers to these photos as the “trash the dress” photos.  So I was smart enough to schedule this photo session after the wedding.  I was also smart enough to know that with a beautiful woman who had grand visions of wedding photos, I would need one stud of a photographer.  This was a job for Scott Jarvie of www.jarviedigital.com (“Jarvie” to most of us).  Jarvie is a fellow member of the mid-single scene that I met on a Caribbean cruise and Julie met at Lake Powell.  I can’t say I knew Scott all that well (guys don’t typically spend much time getting to know other guys on singles cruises if you know what I mean), but one thing I did know about Jarvie, the man was magic with a camera in his hands.  I even recall that on the cruise he managed to somehow get himself into his own photos posing next to many of the lovely women in the photos. Now that’s a man who really knows how to use a camera.

So with the wedding ceremony completed, the guests gone home, and a free day up in Kamas at the base of the Uintas, Julie and I got all gussied up again in our wedding best and jumped in Jarvie’s off-road truck. Based upon that glimmer in Julie’s eye and the fact that Jarvie’s truck looked like he was ready for the zombie apocalypse, I was in for an adventure with these two… and boy was I right.  Hitting the national forest, we veered off almost immediately onto a dirt road in the upper altitudes. My past experience with wedding photographs was being in studios and gardens and carefully posed on tree trunks that were perfectly shaped to sit on in a tux. Yet as Scott bounded up the mountain on reduced pressure tires like a Baja racer, I could quickly see that garden photos were not on the mind of these two.

My suspicions were correct when we veered off even the smaller dirt road through the brush and Scott and Julie jumped out and darted into a grove of aspen. Let’s face it, men are mostly accessories at wedding photos anyway. Our job is to not screw up the photo as much as possible and do what we are told… which I guess is also my job in my new marriage.  So not questioning either of these two, I did my best to keep up with a 41-year-old Montana mother of three bounding over tree stumps while wearing a white frilly dress that is roughly the size of a two-man pup tent.

And my lovely new wife wasn’t the only one I was questioning here. I’m used to photographers finding some nice scenery to fill the slightly out of focus background, setting up a bunch of lights, and then standing in front of you with a camera on the tripod to take your picture.  But Jarive? Nay, nay, Scott looked like he was in the Hunger Games, hiding behind bushes and at times only having a lens sticking through the shrubbery visible.  Being a relatively competent Instagram photographer, some of my photos have even had 30 likes, I couldn’t figure why we were not just taking some photos and applying a nice HDR filter to it later, but photographer and muse both had a vision.   Julie would find a large growth of some mountain weed, and not knowing if they’re poisonous or not jump on in. Jarvie would then jump behind a tree and start taking photos. I just sat there and wondered if I would be able to get either these two to a hospital in time before a snakebite proved to be fatal. 

Moving from mountain vistas to mountain lakes to dusty roads to roaring waterfalls to creeks, Jarvie gave us the highlights of the Uintas and often serenaded us with song.  Julie for her part continued to jump creeks, balance across logs, climb stumps, scale waterfalls, and otherwise bivouac through the forest with no fear in a manner that would have given the designer of her beautiful white dress a brain aneurysm.  After forging her way to what I thought was an inaccessible spot of the mountain, Julie knew exactly where to look relative to the camera, how to give Jarvie different poses with hands, and otherwise work the camera.  I demonstrated that I was as natural in front of the camera as uncle Ricco posing for a Tupperware salesman ID photo.  Jarvie, either standing so far away or so close to a waterfall that we couldn’t hear him, would pantomime pose changes for us. He would make a very manly face for instructions for me and a very feminine face when he wanted Julie to do something.  Though as tough as my new wife was showing herself to be, the feminine faces very well could’ve been for me.

Getting to the last lake nearing sunset and that ideal light that both Julie and Jarvie were craving, Scott realized that he had left his $2,000 lens up at a different lake. Knowing that we had plenty of amazing photos as it was, we jumped back in his truck and darted off toward the lake. After some fast driving and extensive searching, the lens was not there. Someone had grabbed it. It had been a long good day with a slightly sour ending and so I was happy to call it a wrap. But Julie had her evening light with a beautiful purple hue filling the sky and it didn’t take long for Jarvie to step out of his understandable frustration at losing his lens to see the same light. In moments, they were at it again. Julie was traversing the log onto an island no bigger than her dress and Scott was fishing out a couple of flashes and laying in the mud while snapping pictures. A fortuitous passing of a family gave us another flash holder allowing me to jump in a few photos getting the most out of the sunset.

It was a wrap.  What an adventure. Both Jarvie and Julie worked their tails off to get some fun photographs.  We were tired, getting cold, and well past hungry.  Julie’s dress had the grass stains of a quarterback’s jersey with a rookie offensive line.  Scott’s pants were wet and he was down a $2,000 piece of equipment. Yet, all the hard work paid off. No sooner had we departed the lake of the lost lens when a camper chased us to return the located lens.  We found the one place open within 50 miles for dinner (a bar with live a band) where our drunk waitress gave us free meals (and our sober waitress charged us in full) and other inebriated patrons wished us well and gave us marriage advice (something about Julie “hugging my brains out” or something like that). And most of all, when Jarvie got home and uploaded his photos; the hard work, the rugged scenes, the contorted camera angles, the Davie Crockett-like forging through the woods, and even the apparent “bad luck,” all coalesced into one of the most beautiful wedding gifts I can give my wife; photographs that transcend a simple second marriage.  Photographs that made our simple wedding seem monumental. Photographs that, even though the bride and groom are in their 40s, capture the beauty of a new love. Photographs that depict a fairytale ending to the figurative and literal rocky road that both Julie and I had to travel to find each other.  Photographs that I can look to on my wall that remind me of the blessings I have been given in finding my dear Julie.

And after pushing through this wild wedding shoot, it was the last pose of the night that delivered one of the most beautiful photos that Jarvie took that day… 

Thanks Jarvie.