Spokane, Washington at Arbor Gate. I highly, highly, highly support the kind of dancing that makes your booty go smack. It makes it pretty damn fun to be there, too. A+ to you, Charley and McLane.

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More high intensity pics later.

Eugene, Oregon. A lot of tunes at this wedding. Lindsey’s a professional organist and Steve’s a professor of music. For the ceremony there was organ music, a brass ensemble, and a choir. About an hours worth of musicians’ music. Plus Steve’s performance of a song he wrote for Lindsey: it was like Josh Groban got off the drugs and took a poetry writing class. So I sat in the back row as the little church lady told me to, pointed my telephoto toward the front, rested my elbow on my knee, and listened.

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Outside of Kettle Falls, Washington, at Shanti’s folks’ peach orchard. Three years ago Shanti and Heath eloped at the Santa Fe courthouse. So the wedding photographed here, or celebration I should say, wasn’t so much about Shanti and Heath as it was about their family and friends; a chance to party together.

On the outskirts of a tiny town, the vibe was communal like a barn raising: table butter hand churned by a friend, hundreds of paper cranes folded, a local brew served in mason jars with name tags. I marveled at the details, not because they were ornate but because they were pitch-perfect. Like the basket of work gloves sitting on the porch, which Shanti admitted were just work gloves that always sat on the porch. That was the thing: the celebration didn’t feel like a show. It just felt like Shanti and Heath, family, and friends.

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Operating on a hot tip that we’d run into some primo photo opportunities, I told Chelsea and Will that we should head to the Little Spokane River nature area. It was late evening when we got out of our cars. A couple mosquitos landed, but we slapped em and started walking down the trail. Three minutes later there was a mosquito on every freckle. We did that thing where you pretend that you’re frantically and endlessly applying soap to every area of exposed skin. I promised that around every bend we’d finally hit sun. Meanwhile, the river and trail were beautiful, but there was a buzz—a constant, tormenting, Edgar-Allen-Poe-like reminder that we were never alone, that we never numbered fewer than a hundred. Fifteen minutes in, we turned back.

These pics? These pics we took in a field along the road. Then we all sported calamine lotion for a few days.

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