Do you remember me giving you a small, sneak peak of our beautiful bride, Virginia?

Today’s post is Part 1 of Virginia and David’s amazing wedding event in Napa, CA. As we’ve been working on the images, I’ve gone back and forth with how to share our favorites. This was a full, four day event. Four days of incredible event design, flowers, linens, beautiful guests, live music, it was amazing. Do I make a super long slideshow? Every brunch and dinner had exquisite design and table tops. Or do I break the days into separate parts and end with the slideshow?

As you can see, I’ve decided to break the event into separate parts. I don’t want Virginia to have to wait until the slideshow is done to see some of this stuff. I know she’s dying to see something, so I’m going to leak a little here and there. (because I love you Virginia :))

But first, before I forget, two things. One, Happy Father’s Day to all the awesome dads out there! What would we do without you? Hope you had a great one! Two, we are working away at finding our location for the DC workshop ladies! Details and registration coming soon! After we get DC set, we’ll be looking more closely at Minneapolis!

Meet Robert Fountain.

Robert Fountain and his incredible staff were the ones who helped make Virginia’s vision for her wedding event a reality and not just a dream. As someone said on Robert’s staff, Virginia is a bride’s bride. She was so sweet. She’d been planning this event in her head for years. Robert and I both received a three ring binder that had all the cut outs Virginia had collected from flower arrangements to table top designs to colors for her bridesmaid dresses to the designer’s sketch of her dress. Virginia had a clear vision of how she wanted every day to look, and Robert took her vision and sprinkled magic ALL over it! Virginia, her mom, Robert, Jason, David, Arian, WOW, what a team! Let me show you!

The first of the four days began with an Argentinian Asado Dinner.

It was a magical start with an Argentinian Trio playing throughout the evening. I especially loved the hats. These three were fantastic.

The setting was so intense. Robert’s team had been intentional on how the setting would transform as the light of day disappeared. It was amazing to witness.

Before the sun set, look at how beautiful the table tops looked.

Don’t you love the glassware mixed with the rich pinks in the flowers? And the bamboo plates…it was quite a table setting.

And then the sun started to set, and everything turned to gold. This image below is by far, one of our favorites.

Every image is a story. Every image has a main character. Since people were absent in these images, light became the powerful character.

By night fall, the setting had transformed again. From full sun, to sunset, to nightfall: the magic was still ever present. Can you guess the fstop for this image? I had the camera on a tripod so I could stay at a ISO of 100 for rich color saturation. If you guessed that my fstop was high, like f12 or f14, you are right. I had a higher fstop so I could have details in the leaves and twinkling lights.

I went down to a low fstop for this image, somewhere around a 1.8. I wanted to have the green leaves in the foreground blur to soften the framing of the table where Virginia and David dined with their friends.

Brian captured this awesome image. The Chef was busy all night with 5 courses of grilled meat: a true Argentinian BBQ. The marinades, the meat choices, the techniques he used. He never stopped. Brian got behind the grill and captured him in action with the seated guests in the background, and the smoke of his grill rising.

Imagine four days of this kind of beauty, this attention to detail! More to come!

Feel free to post any questions about the images if you’d like to know how we shot them. (I hope you enjoyed this first, or second, peak Virginia! You are going to flip when you see the rest!! This only scratches the surface!)

xoxoxo, Me Ra

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