As the final clock ticks sound off on 2010, I’m officially moving my wedding blog and website over to new homes.

Why? I found a web designer and hosting service that I preferred, as well as a blogging platform that better suits my needs. I spent much of the last few months alternating between changing diapers and changing websites, and I’m really looking forward to 2011, which is looking up to being a very big year. Already with weddings and engagements in Thailand, Vietnam, Bali and Cambodia, can’t wait to get out there again and make some pictures. I’ve got a very itchy trigger finger…..

So please join me over at my new blog. I’ll leave this up for a while so you’ll know where to find me.

Merry Christmas, Happy Channukah, Happy New Year, and, well, let’s just kick it off BIG for 2011!

Here’s some tasty video from last weekend’s bridal shoot from the uber-talented Matt Trecartin. Loving it.

Bridal Photo Shoot from Matt Trecartin on Vimeo.

The photographer directing the action is the lovely Emma Rose, one of the top wedding photographers in Nova Scotia.

In the beginning of August I shot a very special wedding in Danang. Of course, ALL the weddings I shoot are special. But this one will always be a little closer to my heart, as it was the last one I’d shoot as a resident of Vietnam. In Janurary 2011, I will be relocating to Bali, Indonesia, and even though I’ll still be back in Vietnam for assignments every year, it won’t feel quite the same flying in from somewhere else that I call home.

And I couldn’t have hand-picked a better couple to shoot with if I wanted to. Ngoc and Tyler are one of the most fun and friendly couples I’ve had the luck to meet in this line of work. And to make it even tastier, Tyer is a kickass wedding photographer in the Bay Area, so it was great shooting another photographer and talking shop the whole time. We banged out some ideas on the fly together during the portrait shoot, and although you might think it would be stressful having another photographer as a client, it was actually really interesting and a whole lotta fun.

We managed to get in a morning shoot in Hoi An, nice and early before all the shops opened and tourists descended on the old town (read my colleague Aaron Joel Santos’ take on Hoi An). Hoi An is great at that time of day, and you can just wander around and use the simple colors and lines of the old doors and walls to frame your images, before they get cluttered with Coca Cola stands and mannequins wearing garish clothes. It’s hard making a clean frame between 8am and 6pm in Hoi An, and getting up early always pays off.

In the afternoon we reconvened for ceremonies at Ngoc’s family’s home in Danang, and then headed out to a massive wedding hall for a much larger reception for friends and extended families, where we roamed from table to table toasting all the guests, as is Vietnamese custom (see last image below). It’s a great custom, showing respect to every guest that attends the reception, but the one problem is that the bride and groom never get a chance to eat, and after toasting 40-50 tables it can get a little exhausting. At the end of the day, we drove to a little fried chicken place and wolfed down some delicious food after a long day. A beautiful day. A long, beautiful day with wonderful people and amazing food (ask Ngoc and Tyler about the banh my stand in Hoi An. That woman is a sandwich artist!) And a whole lotta humidity. And beer. And on that note…. Một, hai, ba… Yo!

Bi and Ygal are manga comic librarians in Belgium. But when night falls, they fight crime on the mean streets of Brussles…. OK, that second part isn’t true, but the first is. I didn’t know such a cool job existed – and Bi and Ygal are definitely cool. They wanted something a little different for their engagement shoot, and we went back and forth on a list of locations until we agreed on Hue. This was great for us, since we’d never shot an engagement session there before, and it’s always exciting to head to a new town, scout locations, and make some magic.

I’d been to Hue several times before. It’s a really wonderful, mystical place. It makes you feel nostalgic for the pace of life that used to be more common in Vietnam’s cities. It is changing, much like the rest of the country, but at a slower pace. People there seem don’t seem to be in as much of a rush to trade in bicycles for motorbikes, motorbikes for cars, telephones for iPhones, or even ao dai for jeans.  Hue is aso home to the old Imperial City, and the tombs of emperors who used to rule these parts. There’s an endless supply of traditional design and architecture to frame images, and we would absolutely love to come back again to shoot. I feel Aidan and I could easily have done a two or three-day shoot there with Bi and Ygal, and never run out of fresh ideas. That had something to do with the amazing location, but more to do with them. They have so much fun together, and it shows.

Julian:

Markus and Hanh are an American couple who lived in Vietnam for many years before returning to the US just a few years ago. Since they still have a lot of friends in Vietnam, but wanted a wedding with a little extra flavor, they arranged their ceremony to take place in lovely Luang Prabang, Laos.  Luang Prabang is one of those rare gems of a town that has managed to remain fairly sleepy (it is Laos afterall) despite the growth of tourism and all the changes, good and bad, that brings. I first visited there in 1999, and its still charming and romantic as ever, with gorgeous golden wats littered among the leafy, quiet French colonial streets. The people are amazingly friendly, the food divine and prices very reasonable. If I was getting married, this would be very high on my list of destinations.