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It has been a week since John and I had our fabulous wedding/engagement photo shoot, but I waited so long to write about it because … there were so much excitement that I don’t know where to start! 

For a non-Taiwanese, or non-Asian in general, it’s probably a little difficult to grasp the idea of wedding photo shoot months prior to the actual wedding. But as I mentioned in my previous post, wedding photo shoot is a big deal in the contemporary Taiwanese wedding culture (since 1980s), and since, as Taiwanese-Americans, we have the privilege to pick and choose from wedding cultures of Taiwan and U.S., we decided that we’ll do a glamorous wedding photo shoot because it’s memorable experience, plus a great deal of fun! Plus, I am engaged to a super handsome guy, so why shy away from documenting our good looks with some professional photos? Haha.

There are numerous wedding photo studios out there providing same kind of uncreative service. They use same kind of photo taking techniques, same kind of backgrounds, same kind of lighting, and ask their customers to pose the same way. The only difference in works coming out of these studios is that … the models are different, the rest stay the same. That ISN’T the kind of album I want. I want ours to be unique, personalized, and I want it to tell our story. Therefore, I was really happy when John agrees that hiring Julia and Tony for the job. They own a very small business (website written in Mandarin as they are based in Taiwan), but their product is always very impressive. I noticed them online years ago and have always liked their work. But, to get an unique photo album, we needed to do extra work so everything’s personalized. We had to pick out locations for the shoot, plan out an itinerary for both days of the shoot, obtained photo permits, visit the sites, and take time off work.

But it was all worth it! We had a fabulous experience over 2 full days of shoot! Our two-day photo shoot was filled with excitement in every turn, so much so that for days, I couldn’t decide how to write about it because there was simply too much to say. But after much consideration, I decided that such memorable experience much be written down in detail, so here it goes.

Warning: this is going to be long… Read the rest of this entry »

After our big engagement party production, John and I kept the momentum going by planning a grand, grand photo shoot full of unique ideas that I am absolutely proud of. So far, we are doing things half-half, half American and half Taiwanese. That’s how we are - Taiwanese Americans. Therefore for our engagement and wedding, we’ll pick and choose what elements of each wedding culture do we like to include, and what elements to exclude.

So far, we’ve done the engagement in Taiwanese/Christian style. Next, we’ll produce a grand wedding photo album which is a must-do in contemporary Taiwanese wedding culture, and then, we’ll go all western for our wedding. The wedding photo shoot is a huge deal in Taiwan that it is a blooming industry. It’s significance is just like engagement photos in the U.S., except people in Taiwan take the extravagant route by dressing up in fancy gowns, and wedding gowns, have their hair and make up all professionally done in a wedding photo studio, then have all photos bind in a nice album which is usually two inches thick at least. People also have their photos enlarged in poster sizes, or use the photos on wedding invitations… etc. Anything you could think of to go fancy with photo taking, it has been done by Taiwanese wedding photo companies. These wedding photos is also always taken months prior to the wedding, so they will be ready to display on the wedding day. Read the rest of this entry »