WPPI! 2011! It was my third year attending this convention and as always, it was jam-packed with fun and friends and food and fotography. (See what I did there? Alliteration!) Some highlights of this year:

– Rooming with the sweetest ladies {Lydia, Serena & Alice!} and grubbing on shin cups late at night like we’re in the dorms or something
– Dancing so hard at Airplanes and Blazers I broke one of my heels (WOO HOO)
– Sipping pretty pink greyhounds with the lovely Traveling Heart ladies
– Walking away from the trade show with a shiny new Kelly Moore camera bag (I got the hobo! the mustard one!)
– Grabbing Mad Greek for lunch on the way back (a must when visiting Vegas)
– Coming home with the annual inevitable WPPI SARS and being out of commission for about a week. (OH WAIT, that is the opposite of a highlight, that is definitely the lowest of all lowlights, I’ve pretty much figured out that I can only exist in Vegas for 72 hours, any longer and I catch the bubonic plague.)
– Participating in two amazing shoots, one which you shall see below!

For this shoot, we drove out and out (and out) into the Vegas desert, and just when we were all pretty sure we’d be the stars in a “Nine Photographers Go Missing, 237 Weddings Now Photographer-less” article, we arrived at the most amazing little ghost town. They’ve shot all sorts of movies and commercials and ads there, but all you really need to know is that an Anthropologie catalog was photographed there once. THAT’S HOW CUTE IT IS.

Thank you so much to Alice Hu for being an organizational wizard and bringing everything together, to the amazing models for coming out, to Lydia for helping to style, and ban.do for providing us with the sweetest box of accessories to jazz up our shoot. So much fun!

Models: Shelli Anderson | Natalie Brewster | Marissa Knudsen

Wedding Gowns: Bonny Bridal

Hair: Hair by Shelli

Hair Accessories: ban.do {thanks to Ever Ours!}

I’m always amazed how this city provides so much inspiration to me. It definitely helps that it offers so many amazing little locations to shoot, and I get to meet and work with such awesome couples everytime I’m up there for a session! One such location is the Japanese Tea Garden, tucked away in Golden Gate Park (why doesn’t LA have a park like this, WHY) and one such couple were Karen and Lipo. Are they not the sweetest? :)

Melody and Caleb brought along the most lovely picnic for their engagement session! I also fell in love with Melody’s bike, which she rides around her hometown of Big Bear, looking for cute vintage finds like some of the ones they gathered below!

Melody & Caleb are so sweet and in love, and just light up around each other – so excited for their wedding this June {also super excited to work with the amazing Esther of My Bride Story!}