By Monique

My sister Nanette and her husband Cliff celebrated their 10 year anniverary on July 21. We took a trip down the coast to Big Sur to do an anniversary shoot, including eating cupcakes, enjoying a late afternoon in the Big Sur River, and an epic photo session a la trash the dress style at the beach. Nanette made the cupcakes, lemon flavored with white buttercream whipped frosting, and I made their 10 year anniversary flags. She didn’t wear her original dress because it has a lot of intricate beads and pearls hand sewn (by Nanette) all over the bodice, so she didn’t really want to trash her dress. Instead, she went to a thrift shop and got a semi poofy wedding dress because she likes that style. My vision for the shoot was having a more clingy, flowy dress that would stick to her skin when it got wet, so we got one of those too. They brought a bottle of champagne that was made for them for their wedding, with their names and the date on the label. They had intended to drink it much sooner, but never got around to it. So when Cliff popped the cork off, it didn’t do any popping. Mixed in with the pretty portraits below are a few in a sequence of the whole champagne opening and tasting. Yuck, it ended up being really bad, but made a few fun photos! ( I guess the journalist in me wanted to include these images as part of the story) When photographing people at the beach in Northern California during a summer evening, there is more chance than not of having the fog as a backdrop. When we arrived at the beach after the river part of the session at the Big Sur River Inn, the sun was shining low in the sky, providing perfect golden light, but I could see that it was about go behind a huge fog bank hanging far out on the ocean, so we quickly got down to the beach for about 10 minutes of classic golden sunset images. But once it went behind the fog, and since the fog was a long way out, the muted light was also great to work with, so soft and romantic.