The second time around: Exciting news!

So ladies, I've held my tongue for over a month now about some exciting news I have been dying to share with you.  Thanks to the lovely Laura over at Happy Hour with a Housewife, I was able to do some internet browsing via the weddingbee.com classifieds and find a wedding photographer who did a post-wedding photo shoot with me, Mr Fix It and my daughter, Little Miss yesterday!  Typically this is called a day after shoot or a trash the dress shoot, but since it was done 4 months after our wedding and I didn't officially trash the dress, I'm just calling it a post wedding shoot.

You may recall that I was really wanting to do this since I had mentioned in previous posts about how disappointed we were with our photographer.  I also shared about how our photographer pretty much blew us off when I tried to contact him to request some compensation for the lack of photos that we had asked for and didn't receive.  Mr Fix It had said he would be willing to go back to our venue and do another photo shoot but *only* if we had another photographer do it and only if our photog would reimburse us to be able to pay another photog.  Well, since he didn't agree, I wrote off our chances of a post wedding shoot.

But then Laura (who had a lot of the same disappointments about her own photos as I did) suggested I browse weddingbee to find photographers who sometimes offer free engagement sessions.  I e-mailed about 3 different photogs I found and was delighted when I made contact with Rachel Garcia of Brilliant Imagery. 

Rachel is a wedding photog from Vegas who had scheduled a road trip along the So Cal coast at the end of July.  She typically works with a lot of California brides and wanted to see if she could branch out into destination weddings here in So Cal.  So she went up and down the coast offering free e-pic sessions and photo shoots to familiarize herself with the cities, venues and get some photos for her portfolio and website.  When I shared our story with Rachel about how I don't even have one photo of me and Mr Fix It with my daughter from our wedding day, she felt horrible and apologized on behalf of 'all wedding photographers out there.'  Then she told me that she checked out our venue's web site and would love to shoot there for us.

So yesterday, me and my daughter donned our wedding attire again and Mr Fix It put on a nice black suit (no tux this time) and we headed back to Rancho Las Lomas to spend a few hours in the late afternoon browsing the grounds of our wedding venue and snapping some fun, romantic and missed shots post wedding.

Here's the details of the day:

**  Venue:  I e-mailed the venue and they agreed to let us come back on an off day (we picked a Tuesday) completely free of charge and we had total access to the entire venue again...and this time, the tigers were out!  I cannot wait to show you these pics!
**  Hair/Makeup:  My amazing stylist, Natalie Buketov, felt horrible about the fact that one of my false eyelashes was coming off right after our ceremony on our wedding day.  So she e-mailed me offering to do my hair and makeup for our re-shoot totally free of charge!  I only had to pay a $20 sitting fee to the studio she works out of since she is not usually there on Tuesdays.
**  Bouquets:  What's a wedding shoot without a bouquet?  My ever so talented florist, Allison of Flower Allie offered to make us some smaller bouquets in the same color but a little trendier for me and my daughter to use for our photo shoot.  The only cost?  She just asked that our photog get a couple good shots for her to put in her portfolio.
**  Suit:  Mr Fix It just wore one of his own nice black suits instead of paying to rent the tux all over again.  Only difference?  This time, we got the infamous shoe shot I had been longing for!
**  Dress:  I had already had my dress cleaned but my dry cleaner who I have frequented for years told me he would re-clean the dress for less than half of what I originally paid after we re-did our photos.  This was the only other charge I had for the photo shoot. 
**  Alterations:  I didn't need any alterations done to the dress but my seamstress offered to steam the gown for me for the shoot and even touched up some of the bustline where the beading and threads had come loose from the drycleaning.
**  Other help:  My cousin, a bridesmaid who had helped my sis get me into my gown, came down with us and did the hair/makeup for my daughter and then helped get me into my gown and jewelry for the pics.  What a sweetheart she was!  Little Miss also wore the same dress she had worn as a bridesmaid.

So all in all, I paid about $85 to have a post-wedding shoot.  Rachel was so amazing and fun to work with and did a fabulous job of making us feel relaxed. 

And this time around, we got shots in the orange orchard, near the antique car, near the fish pond, in front of the fountain pool, and in several other places around the grounds that we had asked for from the first photographer but didn't get captured. 

I absolutely cannot wait to show you the photos once we get them all back from Rachel! 

As a side note, my florist, Allison, did tell me that even though it was unfortunate that we didn't get all the shots we wanted from our photographer, he was in fact an above average wedding photographer.  She said she was in tears at one wedding about a month ago where the photographer was horrible and didn't get hardly any good shots at all.  I have to agree that we did in fact get a lot of great shots from him for sure (as I will be sharing my wedding album with you soon), but it was so nice to be able to go back in a relaxed setting and get some of the shots and locations at our venue that we weren't able to get on our wedding day.