Erin and Matt recently won the Bridal Idol contest from 104.9 The Cat, and it’s been a whirlwind few months for them to get their wedding planned, and it’s all coming to a close at the Crooked Lake House in just a few short weeks! We finally got to shoot their engagement session last week and wanted to show off a few of our favorite shots. It is really tough to get an engagement session done within months of a wedding, much less weeks, but this spring in upstate NY has just not cooperated with us. We were so lucky to get a few hours where it didn’t rain for us to be able to get these photos for them, as it had been POURING all week. We had to reschedule so many sessions over the past few weeks, so we are really happy that we managed to sneak in a few dry hours with Matt and Erin. We started off our session at the beautiful Highlands Castle overlooking Lake George, and later made our way into town for some more fun – we’ll share those with you later, but for now, here’s some of the great stuff we got around the castle. Special thanks to Joanna Romanzo of Lipstick n’ Lashes for the awesome hair and makeup!

The skies were a little ominous, but it made for some cool shots!

Love this one.

Such a cute couple, such gorgeous scenery, just perfection.

This next one is one of Lisa’s shots and I absolutely love it.

And of course, our signature shot. Gotta show off that bling some more!

These two are so great together.

This next one is one of my favorites.

This next one was our Facebook teaser. Had you liked our page, you would have seen it first! Erin and Matt are a little edgier than most of our couples, so we wanted a really dark, moody photo, so we absolutely love this one. Lisa thinks it’s very “Twilight.”

Moving inside the castle now…

Another favorite:

Yeah, Matt’s rocking the model face.

Stay tuned part two coming at you really soon!

First, I have posted all of Nicole and Doug’s wedding photos on my portfolio, and you can view them all and purchase prints here.

It was a beautiful wedding on the shores of Saranac Lake, NY, in the heart of the Adirondacks at their lakeside hotel, Gauthier’s. The reception was held at Hohmeyer’s Lake Clear Lodge, a rustic 1800′s era “great camp” estate on the shores of Lake Clear. They served a wonderful German meal, and the bride actually created all the details herself! As an event planner herself, she really set a great atmosphere with her details and designs. It was a chilly day in late fall in upstate New York, and the ceremony had to be moved inside their hotel due to wet ground from a recent snowfall, but that did nothing to dampen the joy and excitement of the day. Their family and friends were extremely close, and everyone had an AMAZING time. Have a look at the slideshow!

Now, for any other photographers here, or anyone who values their digital images, please read on. These wedding images took me a full month to finish editing, much longer than my standard. This is because, as I was finishing the editing the first time, my external hard drive which contains ALL my images crashed. If you have a hard drive, the question isn’t if it will crash, it’s WHEN! I am meticulous about my backups, and I have a system set up to take an automatic backup of ALL my data every day onto a separate external hard drive. I figured I was safe, and I might just have to redo the editing for 100 pictures or so that I had done the previous day. I then went to my backup disk and tried to restore from it, only to discover that due to the type of failure my main hard drive had, my backup drive had not built backups of ANY of their wedding pictures, it was as if I had never downloaded them off my memory cards.

This was a very scary moment for me, as losing the images of a couple’s wedding would be devastating. Luckily, I had a separate, secondary backup of the images. That’s right, I had all the images in three places, because I just can’t risk the chance of losing wedding images like that. Unfortunately, I had not backed up to the secondary backup since I uploaded Doug and Nicole’s photos the first time, so all the editing work I did was gone and I had to start over. This was a lot of work, but it was totally worth it to me knowing that it was SO much better to work twice as hard on the images as opposed to having lost them completely. So, as a note to anyone out there who has any important information or photos on a hard drive, back it up, at least twice, because your backup may fail as well.

I never thought I could lose data on two drives, but it happened, and the extra backup saved me and saved some amazing images that would have been memories lost forever. I hope this serves as a cautionary tale to get people to buy some extra external hard drives! For my clients, you can be sure that your images and memories are safe with me.