Nice Day For A (Winter) White Wedding

So we were in Pittsburgh over the weekend for my cousin Beth's wedding. Here is all the background you need about our relationship to western Pennsylvania: I was there exactly once before this weekend, but my husband used to live there, and that is apparently enough for him to insist on raising our daughter as a Steelers fan. (Although technically I believe that we are splitting the difference.)

Anyway: back at the dawn of time when G and I were planning our wedding, we talked briefly about doing something small, maybe on an island somewhere, but something quiet and intimate and maybe in a garden. Beth and Chris's wedding? Almost exactly what I would want if I had to do it all over again. The ceremony was at the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, and there were only about 30 people there, and we all got to be part of a beautiful moment.

It's unfortunate that none of these pictures do justice to the bride and groom, or to the Parterre de Broderie (Broderie Room), a small-scale French palace garden. Basically, I over-reached my skillset as a photographer. I didn't use my fancy equipment correctly (or at all, in the case of the tripod), and I tried not to use a flash, and so a lot of the pictures are either far away or too jiggly and blurry. Ambitious amateur fail!

But none of that is important, really -- it was a beautiful, beautiful day. Beforehand, I described the wedding to someone at work as "high-end hippie," but I was grossly mistaken. There was nothing less than classic elegance about this wedding. Beth looked breathtaking, as she always does, and her new husband Chris was just as handsome and sweet as ever. I can't imagine a setting or an evening more perfect than this was.

And then afterwards we went back to one of the coolest hotels I have ever visited and ate great food and wore Lady Gaga glasses and some of us might even have posed for pictures WITH CANDLES ON OUR HEADS but I am not going to point any fingers ... and I am not going to talk about that until tomorrow.