We’re taking a break from US travels today so I can shamelessly promote my good friend Andy Rous, who also happens to be our wedding photographer. Not bad timing, since probably the next post coming will be the one where I finally show you photos of the Vegas wedding we went all that way for!
It’s also a chance for me to show you some of our official wedding photos which I promised you a long time ago and never got around to…
Andy and I have been friends since I was, hmm, about 14? That was about the time I joined the joint youth group between my church and the one in the next village. There I found myself mostly surrounded by guys two or three years older than me who already had cars and enjoyed making fun of my girliness. Andy was one of those guys đŸ™‚
He went of to uni to study photography and since then has taken the photos for so many of my friends’ weddings: Rob and Katherine, Jon and Kat, Will and Lucy…
So when Rasmus and I were thinking about who to do our photos I automatically thought of him first. He spent all day with us on the Sunday (the day we got married), coming early while Jen and I and my girlfriends were getting ready, then snapping away all through the ceremony, the walk down to the village hall and the tea party there. We have some really good pictures from that day.
The following Saturday we were back in Brussels for the big knees-up there with all our multi-national friends in Belgium there and family and friends from Denmark, UK, and USA flying in for the fun.
We’d always had this idea from the beginning that we wanted fun wedding photos. The worst part of a wedding for me is all that time you take standing around trying to make the one free drink you’re given last and pretending to enjoy the awkward smalltalk while you wait for the couple to take the fiftieth photo with another arrangement of distant relatives.
We were pretty sure we’d never put those photos up on our wall anyway.
So we had an idea which we pitched to Andy which he loved! We would get ready in the morning and spend Saturday afternoon before the party wandering around our favourite places in Brussels taking fun photos.
(The getting ready in the morning turned out to be the hardest part since we’d not got to bed till 3am the night before since all our good friends were in town and we were having way too much fun. We were both still sleeping when the girls turned up to do my hair and makeup…)
The afternoon was sooo much fun! Seriously, after the whole getting married part, one of the highlights was spending a whole afternoon together taking photos.
We went to all the places we love most or that we have a special relationship with. First stop was the metro closest to our flat. Before we got married I lived six stops away so countless evenings Rasmus would walk me to the metro and say goodnight here. This was maybe the most fun place to take photos, especially since we were such an unusual sight! We had lots of funny looks, waves, thumbs up, “felicitations!”…
Then we got the metro to the Palais de Justice which is one of my favourite places in the city. It turned out that Rasmus had never been inside before but it was a great place for photos – these towering pillars, high ceilings, huge staircases.
Once we were done there we wandered outside and were feeling quite peckish so got waffles and coke from the waffle van. Actually, he gave us the coke for free which was sweet. There’s a great view over the city from the square up there so we took a few more.
Then down the elevator (come visit and you’ll find out what I’m talking about) and on to one of our favourite antique stores in the Marolles district, where we bought our dining table and the wood beams we made our “wine cellar” from. We just walked in all dressed up and said “can we take photos”. They were so nice to us! Anyone who gave us a wedding gift will have seen this photo already because we used it for the thank you cards we made.
It was such a fun afternoon, and the perfect prelude to a really fun and celebratory evening at the party, when Andy continued snapping photos.
And really, how great are these photos?! They are wedding photos I would actually be happy and not embarrassed to hang on our wall (or put on my facebook profile!). Andy is a great photographer and I think he did a good job capturing us in these photos, rather than a couple who looks like every other wedding couple.
AND he has a shiny brand new website for you all to go look at!!! Excitingly, the first photo you see is of us, and if you go to the Wedding gallery you’ll see even more, along with a lot of my friends’ weddings (and a few random but nice strangers).
If you know anyone getting married and looking for a photographer, point them Andy’s way đŸ™‚
