mrs. cupcake's wedding blog: Love is All About "We": Ready For Our Close-Up

All photos below by The Wiebners unless otherwise noted. We purchased a disc of all unedited images from our wedding day, so some post-processing has been done by me for the purpose of sharing the photos with you. Click on any photo to enlarge.

After our wonderful ceremony, we had a somewhat small window of time to get some formal photos taken. Around 4:40, we herded our families back into the sanctuary to get some traditional group photos. The Wiebners did a magnificent job speeding through everything painlessly, and we'll now forever have these traditional photos to document the family members who were there with us on our big day. But truth be told, in all reality, the pics are kinda boring. You know — everyone standing in the same spot smiling.... aaaaand that's pretty much it. It was definitely something we wanted to do, and we're glad we did it, but there's not much to tell you about them. So I won't bore you with those cookie cutter shots. They basically all looked like this, but with different people standing with us:

Got it? Cool!

Around 5:00 (right on schedule!) we relieved our families from their photo duties so they could get ready for our 6:00 cocktail hour. We all began to head out of the church; many months before I had dreams of a ribbon wand send-off, but in the few weeks before the wedding, Mr. Cupcake and I decided to scrap the idea. I was a tiny bit heartbroken, but we just didn't need anymore projects to worry about, and the logistics didn't make sense since we needed to take family photos and the rest of our guests would already be gone from the church. Well, you know what? The ribbon wands were the last thing on my mind as we gleefully made our way to our limo, and it turns out that the photos Mr. Cupcake's cousin took during this time are some of my favorite shots from the day. Go figure :-)

{ photo by Mr. Cupcake's cousin, Evan }

My "fly catching" pose. { photo by Mr. Cupcake's cousin, Evan }

{ photo by Mr. Cupcake's cousin, Evan }

My favorite! { photo by Mr. Cupcake's cousin, Evan }

{ photo by Mr. Cupcake's cousin, Evan }

As everyone else headed to The Desmond, we were on our way to the West Chester Railroad depot. My mom and I had discovered this spot when we were photo scouting in the weeks leading up to the wedding, and I had called ahead to make sure we were allowed to take photos there. We were, and the historic trains only run on Sundays, so we weren't disrupting the service (and there was no one else around so we had free reign to go wherever we wanted). The Wiebners were excited to shoot there, and the results are pretty amazing, if I do say so myself!

Taking into consideration travel time and the fact that we wanted to get to The Desmond for the majority of our cocktail hour, we had about 30 minutes for our photos. This proved to be plenty of time when working with speedy professionals! I'll let most of the photos speak for themselves... but you know I have to add a little commentary here and there :-)

Such a nice husband, holding my flowers for me.

I was excited to get a little "runaway veil" shot. I love how the below shot came out!

Some sexy man was watching me as I got my glam on...

We bought all of the guys these matching teal argyle socks (we went to about 4 different Macy's locations to get all 6 pair). Of course, we forgot to ask the Wiebners to get a shot of all of the guys wearing them! But that's okay, because they got this totally rad shot of Mr. C's socks below.

"Oh, hello. Come here often?"

This weird, totally beat up van was near some of the railroad cars, with a little spray-paint message written for some chronic window-breakers. Mr. Cupcake and I put on our best "hard ass" faces and posed as said window-breakers.

Meanwhile, Joel was playing with my bouquet... he had quite a thing for my flowers that day, and got some really amazing shots of them!

Time for more glamour shots!

Very GQ, dontcha think?

We did our best "American Gothic" poker-face pose for Rita below (minus the pitchfork).

Then we couldn't help but smile...

... and gaze lovingly at each other...

... and get in a little smoochy smoochy.

Meanwhile, Joel got a cool ring shot:

The below photo is pretty typical of us... laughing hysterically. I don't remember what we were laughing at, but I am pretty sure it was something my new husband said!

We were all done with the super cool trains, and headed back to our limo. (In the below photo, you can see our teeny, tiny limo driver, Teddy, waiting for us on the other side of the tracks.)

We had about a 15-minute journey back to The Desmond, and had just enough time before heading to our cocktail hour to squeeze in a few shots at the little orange antique shop right around the corner from the hotel. I love the pop of color in these photos!