Warning: there are a LOT of photos in this blog post. But I am not going to make any apologies for that. Katie is one of the most special people in my life and I am going to celebrate that with showing off maybe too many photos. But first, let me tell you a story. Ten years ago I photographed a wedding in Vancouver. At the time, my then-friend-now-husband Josh lived in Vancouver and I stayed with him while I was there. He came to that wedding with me and we were seated at a table with a bunch of random people including this girl called Katie who was traveling from Australia and was at the wedding as a guest of another (in short: she knew no one else there). There was something about this Katie that just clicked. Our friendship was slow to start but once it got going, there was no turning back. Today I cannot imagine not having her in my life. Despite living on the other side of the world, she is one that I can go to at any point in my life and she will tell me exactly what I need to hear. She has this light and wisdom about her that until you experience it firsthand, you simply cannot describe. She is one of the best people that I know and when I found out that Rob had proposed to her, my heart fluttered.

Katie is a collector of many things – tea cups, crockery, vintage living room sets – and because of this, I feel that she had been preparing most of her life for her wedding day. We brought all of these things out of their garage and on the wedding, they shone. On April 19th, they hosted a small group of their nearest and dearest at their home in the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia.  It was beautiful. In the morning, Rob got ready at the Chenrezig Centre which is a Buddhist Centre. The night before his wedding he slept there, in a bed that the Dali Lama once slept in. Pretty darn cool. Katie and the girls got ready at the beautiful Secrets on the Lake. They had rented a cottage that was once a 1910 train station and was then moved to it’s current location in the forest. Their ceremony was then held at their home and it contained three parts: first an Aboriginal man did a traditional ceremony followed by a civil ceremony and then all of the guests walked to form a sharing circle. It was incredible.

The last time that I had visited Katie and Rob, I spent Christmas with them (after photographing Kathy and Andrew’s wedding in New Zealand). On that trip, their daughter Pearl refused to let me take her photo, no matter how much I begged her or reminded her that on my previous visit, she had let me. At one point she looked at me cheekily and said “You may only photograph me when my Mum gets married.” I am not sure if she thought that the day would never come or if she knew that Rob would soon pop the question to her Mum but I held her to this and she remembered. On this trip, she allowed me to get plenty of images of her and her little sister Freya. Thank you, Pearlstar.

There is so much more that I could say about this wedding. About how Katie was given her dress by a woman who has been married for nearly fifty years. This woman wanted her to have it and wear it on her wedding day. Katie had it altered and the night before the wedding, Katie’s girlfriends sat together and finished sewing on the edging. So many hands touched that beautiful dress. I could tell you about the flowers. About the day before the wedding, Katie and I went to the markets to pick some out and how we stopped by the roadside to get more natives and how we then went home and made her gorgeous bouquet out of them. And Katie’s wedding boots! Those boots! She saw them years ago and had dreams of one day wearing them when she got married. How she actually did buy them before she was even engaged and how they sat lovingly in her closet just waiting for the big day when they could shine.

So here are a ton of photos from Katie and Rob’s wedding. This post only contains half of my favourite photos from their wedding so you’ll have to wait until next week to see the portraits and reception photos. In 2005, we randomly met this beautiful woman on the West Coast of Canada and ten years later, we attended her wedding, as a newly married couple ourselves, in the Sunshine Coast of Australia. This life is pretty random and awesome and I am so grateful to have these people in my life.

This wedding was also featured on Wedding Chicks!