When it comes to arranging a wedding, no matter how long it took or how well-organised your preparation was, NOTHING actually prepares you for the day itself. If I were to describe our wedding in one single description, the right way to describe it is that… it was full of emotions. A 7-year worth of relationship, packed into 2 beautiful Italian summer days, to commemorate a lifetime commitment.

Riesky and I have always known we wanted a small, intimate wedding. We just never knew it would be this small and intimate, 25 people to be exact, and it was nothing if not perfect. We couldn’t have asked for a better group of people – family, friends that are pretty much family, vendors that are pretty much friends, everything seems to agree with us on that day. If you ask me if it was difficult to arrange the wedding from overseas, you can ask anyone I know that I’m probably the most stress-free bride. Drama-free? Of course not, it was a wedding – you do expect some dramas and last minute surprises. For us, the drama was not being able to do a civil signing in Venice although we’ve planned months ahead for it. But I believe that everything happens for a reason. And at the end of the day, we don’t even remember that drama because everything else was just beyond our imagination – and most importantly, nothing made us happier than to have the company and full support of those 25 people, even when we ridiculously decided to get married 5000 miles away from home.

When I mean everything works in our favour, it literally did. Just a day after our wedding, Venice was storming. As we left Venice on that day, we had a talk about this on the boat ride that we were really blessed with a great weather during the wedding day. The sun was bright all afternoon for the church ceremony and the wedding shots, then it started setting just when we had our cocktail and dinner, making it the perfect weather to sit outdoor on the beautiful garden facing the water. We’re talking about luck? We’re full of it. We both knew we wanted everything to be captured in film, and so about 5 months before the wedding, one of my bridesmaids who happened to work in Axioo, told me that Adi will be in Europe and will be available on the day of my wedding – even better, he had a change of client just a few weeks before and will shoot in Venice a few days before my wedding. The same thing happened to my makeup artist, Ci Ely Agustina, who originally had to fly in from Amsterdam. Thank you to their previous clients (and I suppose fate?), we got to meet both of them the day before the wedding and the connection with these two was almost instant. I believe that it is important to be surrounded by people with positive energy during your wedding day, after all, it is your big day, anything could happen and overflowing emotions might hit at any moment. And that’s why we are forever thankful to work with vendors that are like friends, making us so comfortable during the day, just like having friends around – effortless.

I could really go on about this, but I’m sure none of these words could describe the day better than the rolls and rolls of film that Adi used to beautifully capture the day. Hope everyone enjoy them as much as we do!

Love,

Charina