Yet another adventure with the Traveling Hearts!

You may remember our previous trips to Palm Springs and Big Bear – this time we met up in breezy Santa Cruz for the usual shooting, laughing, cooking, eating, drinking, interspersed with local activities like beach visits, roller coaster rides, the Mystery Spot, and lots of hanging out on our sunny little deck.

It’s no secret that I love these ladies to pieces. They are smart and sweet and warm and ambitious and hilarious and as evidenced in the photos below – stunningly beautiful both inside and out :)

As always, I’ll start it all off with our stopmotion video – put together brilliantly by Mary!

A behind the scenes shot.

Ending it with a couple group photos, the first taken by Ala (“be bridesmaids!!”) and the second set up by Heather. Already can’t wait until our next trip!!

Our second Vegas shoot {see the first one here!} took place along the Vegas strip. Loved all the colors, lights, and reflections we stumbled across! Again, the models were totally amazing, braving crazy wind & bitter cold for the sake of awesome photos.

The wonderful people who made it all happen…

Shoot organized by Alice Hu
Models: Shelli Anderson | Natalie Brewster | Marissa Knudsen
Hair: Hair by Shelli
Hair Accessories: ban.do {with styling by Ever Ours}
Wedding Gowns: Bonny Bridal

And a very special thank you to Lydia of Ever Ours for sharing these shoots on her blog last week! :) Her blog is one of my favorites and it’s always so much fun collaborating with her!

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!}