Nikki and Chad: Our Wedding Portrait

POSTED BY Nikki Guerrero, 02 October 2007

Before we left for Arizona, where our wedding was to be held, we decided to have portraits done in the gardens of a friend’s home in Portland, OR. It was mid-August , drizzling, and the temperature was dropping into the low 60s. In the portrait shown here I am holding a flask, and we kept taking nips of whiskey to stay warm.

Since our outfits and the theme of our wedding was 1930's I wanted to create vintage looking wedding portraits. As a style guide, I used a collection of vintage hand colored postcards both of female portraits and of couples posed in romantic embraces. Tom Harris brought lighting equipment and photographed the portraits. Jeanie was a pro at getting Chad and I into just the right poses and keeping us from giggling as Tom hit the shutter. She also directed me into the eyes looking off and “up to the heavens” poses we had picked to mimic the vintage postcards.

My husband Chad was determined not to see me in my wedding dress until the actual ceremony so we decided to take separate portraits in our wedding outfits. Chad dressed in his 1930s sharkskin tuxedo and fedora. My dress was reconfigured from a 1920s silk lace drop waist dress and over jacket, but I retreated to change into my vintage dressing gown for the pictures together with Chad.

We used several props including a small prayer book from my grandmother, a flower bouquet made from my garden dahlias, a gorgeous Spanish shawl from Jeanie’s aunt, and Jeanie’s amazing peacock feather fan. The flask was a pre-wedding gift from my girlfriend Brigid, made from a 1930s design so it fit perfectly into our vintage theme.

We had a blast taking the shots and did get a few good ones. I ending up choosing a few of the digital shots to desaturate (Photoshop into black and white) and have printed. My plan is to hand color them and frame them in vintage frames as gifts to our parents, and who knows, maybe we will end up with one ourselves.