New York Wedding photographer

My sister mildly shocked us all a few years back when she went off travelling around Asia. In the space of a year she’d met and fell in love with Valerie and decided to move to America and marry the love of her life. Crazy and quick it may have been but it was pretty romantic. And in order to keep their spontaneous tendencies going they decided to head up to New York City to tie the knot. They announced this to us about a week before they’d planned to do it which didn’t leave much time for getting us all over there. But I couldn’t quite get my head around letting my sister get married without her wedding photographer sister! So my mum and me plotted, with the help of Valerie, to get me over there to surprise Emma.

I’m not sure how we managed it but I rocked up on the evening before their wedding and found them in a little bar in Greenwich Village drinking beer and eating popcorn. My sister’s face was priceless! It was a great feeling to have successfully pulled off the surprise. More beer and popcorn followed and I think I’m a little bit to blame for the hangovers the next day.

New York Wedding photographer

Their wedding day was awesome, they got dressed up and we heading for some brunch before heading to Central Park to meet the Wedding officiate. Unlike in this country where places have to get licenses to hold weddings, in the United States people are the ones with the license, which meant Em and Val could get married wherever they liked. They chose a lovely little spot down by the water under a little gazebo, which was the perfect size for the two of them and for their friend Taylor and me, their witnesses. It was lovely and little, we shared a lovely bottle of bubbles and I got to take some really nice pictures of the pair of them going on a little wander afterwards in the dimming light.

Taylor works halfway up the Empire State Building and managed to get us half-price tickets to go up to the top, which was incredible and an amazing New York thing to do when you’ve just got married. We found some food at an amazing Korean BBQ restaurant and had many more drinks. I’d also managed to get a few friends from back home to get some cards to me for the pair of them to open. And a last little surprise I’d made a wire cake topper, but in the absence of a cake it had to go in the top of a couple of beer bottles, which suited them even more than if there had been cake.

Their day was a true New York elopement! Spontaneous, romantic, unplanned, with surprises, skylines, bubbles, beer, shots, laughing and BBQing! Pretty good for a day that started with a hangover…