Adventure photos tell a unique love story
Post-wedding adventure shoot captures couple’s love story perfectly
Climbing a mountain on your wedding day to get the perfect photo probably isn’t realistic for most couples. It wasn’t for Chris and Joanne Pawluk, either. After all, they had 315 guests to celebrate with in St. Albert.
But that didn’t stop them from shooting wedding portraits in the midst of the breathtaking scenery of Jasper.
Chris and Joanne opted for an “adventure session” with their photographer, Carey Nash: a postwedding photo shoot — in full wedding attire — that allows the couple to spend hours posing for gorgeous shots, without having to worry about getting a little dirty.
By the end of their six-hour session, for example, the bride and groom had been captured at a sandy beach area just off the highway going into Jasper; Pyramid Lake; and the aforementioned mountain, where, they say, some passing tourists were so impressed to find a fully clad bride and groom, they requested a photo op.
That was on Monday. Two days earlier, the couple was wed in what they loosely define as a “garden-greenhouse” celebration at the Enjoy Centre (101 Riel Drive, enjoycentre.ca).
“We’d go through magazines, and we had no idea what we wanted,” says Joanne of the planning process. “So we just had lots of beautiful flowers everywhere. My two biggest things on the wedding were that I needed to have fresh flowers and I wanted top-shelf booze.”
Joanne had never been the type to fantasize about her wedding. In fact, Chris ended up doing the lion’s share of the research.
“As he puts it, he did the background work and I was the CEO,” says Joanne. “I just said yes and no. He did a phenomenal amount of work … It’s nice to know that your partner cares about this day as much as you do, maybe the details a little bit more than you do!”
Some of the groom’s favourite wedding details were the homages to their respective heritages.
“The most memorable part of the wedding was being able to bring so many people together to share our cultural traditions,” Chris says.
His grandparents, for example, had Ukrainian wedding bread made. And the couple performed a traditional Korean paebaek ceremony — complete with ceremonial Korean wedding attire called hanbok — in which the couple honours their parents and relatives, who in turn offer blessings for the bride and groom.
The bride’s favourite moment was Chris’s wedding speech, in which he spoke for three-anda-half minutes in Korean for the benefit of her family.
That planning and attention to detail dates back to the couple’s engagement.
Chris and Joanne, now in their mid-30s, went to the same junior high school in Edmonton, but didn’t start dating until much later. In fact, Chris, a chartered accountant, had been living in Calgary for several years when he finally reconnected with Joanne, an occupational therapist currently doing her PhD at the University of Alberta, at a mutual friend’s engagement party in Edmonton in September of 2011.
That encounter kicked off nine months of a long-distance relationship before Chris eventually moved back to his home city.
He completely surprised her with an elaborate engagement plan in May of 2014. An injury sustained during a half marathon earlier that month had left him on crutches, but he was determined to carry on with his plan.
“At that point, I already had the ring,” he says. He also wanted to include all three of their dogs, as Joanne is a huge dog-lover and supporter of rescue agencies.
“It was at Terwillegar Dog Park. The question was, How do I organize the logistics here? How do I get everything there? Joanne was really wondering why I was pushing myself to walk so much, but I had to. Planning it, I was able to force myself to walk, limping around Terwillegar Dog Park trying to scope out a spot that was secluded.”
In the end, with the help of his two sisters, he pulled it off. There was a sign reading “Happily ever after starts here,” photos of the two of them were hung on trees in the park, a picnic and a bottle of wine. And even though Joanne was completely caught off-guard (first thinking the picnic was someone else’s; then thinking she’d forgotten their anniversary), the two of them did arrive with three dogs in-tow, and she did say yes.
The wedding went much more smoothly, thanks in part to the fact that, while they did take plenty of photos on their wedding day, Joanne and Chris saved the bulk of it for their adventure session in Jasper.
“We wanted to spend as much time with our friends and family as possible,” says Joanne. “That’s all we cared about. We had even picked a place in St. Albert to go to take a few photos, but the day of the wedding, we just kiboshed it. Just seeing so many people who were there to celebrate us, we wanted to be around them. We didn’t want to leave!”
Besides, the mountaintop photos were totally “them.”
“Our story has been such a wonderful, crazy adventure. And the adventure sessions that Carey does — that’s what they are,” says Joanne. “They’re very unplanned and beautiful. I think it fit perfectly with who we are.”