Brett Jarnagin – Wedding and Senior Photography – Jarnagin Photography

As always, I’m starting a blog post off, apologizing for the lack of blog posts!  This time I actually have a good reason though! Just about a month and a half ago, Casey and I got married!  I now have such a better understanding of my wedding clients.  All the chaos, the planning, the blur that is your wedding day… experiencing that first hand is only going to help me better take care of  my wedding couples.

Anyway, we got married on April 16th on what was probably the coldest day in April.  The weekend before it was like 80 degrees and the day after our wedding it was 70.  That is just my luck though (as this blog post will reveal time and time again.) Despite the weather, it was an amazing day.  Casey did such an incredible job decorating the wedding.  She made almost every single decoration by hand!  She is quite the crafter.  My younger, hotter, non-felon version of Martha Stewart, haha.  You can view some of our wedding pictures on our photographer, Deidre Lynn’s website and view decorations and more pictures that were featured on Ruffled Blog. I couldn’t be luckier to be married to my best friend.  We’ve already had such an incredible life together and I know it is just going to keep getting better.

(here’s where the bad luck really starts to kick in.  Insert awkward segue here.  I’m mostly including all this bad luck stuff because my luck is so bad it is funny.)

The day after our wedding, I was in agony.  The truth is, I’ve been in agony for about five years now battling tremendous back pain.  At the start of this year it got so bad that I wasn’t even myself.  I didn’t want to work, I didn’t want to go out, I didn’t joke very much… I didn’t want to do anything.  I don’t think I’ve ever really showed Casey that I was in pain, but it got to the point I couldn’t hide it anymore.  The week of the wedding I painted several rooms of the house and moved a bunch of benches at our wedding site which destroyed my back.  I had to take several vicodin and muscle relaxers on our wedding day just so I wouldn’t be suffering. So the next day was really bad.  I had to go to the emergency room because I was in more pain than I’ve ever experienced in my life.  They gave me a couple shots and prescribed me some pills but those only did so much.

(shifting gears to happier topics)

The next day we headed off on our honeymoon to beautiful Hawaii!  We got the opportunity to go last year when I photographed Curt and Angela’s wedding in Maui.  We definitely fell in love with Hawaii and couldn’t wait to go back.  This time we headed to the Big Island.  It was beautiful as always and it was definitely a trip of highs and lows (as all trips I take tend to be.) The first couple days we just explored a bit.  We are pretty adventurous travelers.  Instead of doing a bunch of activities, we just like to explore where we are and we drove down just about every road we could find in both Maui and the Big Island. We started out in a little Yaris which definitely wasn’t cutting it.  Some of the roads we drove down were so rough I thought that car was going to fall apart.  So we headed back to the rental place and traded it in for a Jeep.  Now this was more like it!  The day we got the Jeep we went down to a place called South Point.  It is the southernmost tip of the US.  When you get down there, there aren’t really roads.  Only trails that have been carved into the landscape by thousands of cars.  This was easily the roughest terrain we have ever driven on.  Some spots are literally like 80 degree inclines.  There were a couple times we felt like we were going to flip over forwards going down them.  We had a blast driving around though and got to see a green sand beach which was pretty cool.  We also went out to watch some waves crash in against the lava rock.  These waves were unlike any I had ever seen.  They were enormous and had perfect tubes on them.  Being the daredevil/idiot that I am, I kept getting further and further out on this jagged peninsula as the waves crashed in.  Eventually I just sat down on the tip.  A huge wave came up and I looked back at Casey like “oh snap.”  So I held on to the rocks let it crash into me.  Not a good idea.  You really underestimate the power of a wave until you feel it.  Luckily it didn’t pull me off the rocks because I honestly would have died.  There was no way I could swim in that and the waves just would have smashed me against the jagged rocks.  But I got up and ran back about 30 feet to Casey and as I did that a wave that was 5 times the size came in all the way to where Casey was!  I think I left that spot in the nick of time.  We really had a blast though.  When we started to head back, I had Casey get out and film me driving so we could show everybody how rough these trails were.  I hit an incline with a little too much speed (the camera being on and me trying to make it look cool may have had something to do with that…) Anyway, the Jeep got airborne and when it came down, the wheel broke hard right and I smashed into an embankment which whipped the entire vehicle around.  I didn’t get hurt or anything but the Jeep definitely did.  We got in to pull away and the front tires weren’t even touching the ground.  Luckily I got us out of there and we inspected the damage.  The bumper was destroyed, the fender fell off, and the axel was bent so bad that the steering wheel had to be turned way to the right just to go straight. The wreck also cracked the glass on the back of my camera and bent up some other equipment.  That kind of put a damper on the day.  We took the car back because it was driving weird and wouldn’t turn left very well, haha.  They acted like it was no big deal and that it happened all the time.  It ended up only costing us our deductible which was $500 so it wasn’t a big deal.  It makes for a funny story! A couple days later we decided to go see the flowing lava that the Big Island is known for.  That was the main reason we chose to go there.  The lava flow was literally on the complete opposite side of the island at the furtherest possible point from our hotel which was about a 2 1/2 hour drive.  We went all the day down there and got to the spot.  There weren’t really any signs or anything but there were warnings about people getting killed and all that so we figured we were in the right place.  We started walking down the road for about a mile and then it just ended in lava rock.  It was a pretty cool site to see.  Again, we figured we must be in the right place.  So we started hiking across this stuff which is about the weirdest terrain on the planet.  All you could see for miles was black rock.  After a couple miles we started to wonder how far this lava flow was.  It was starting to get dark so I told Case I would just start running ahead to see if there was anything up there.  If I saw something I would wave her on and if not I’d run back.  Well I took off running for what seemed like forever.  I looked back at Casey and she was just a little speck on the landscape.  After I got up over a big ridge I decided there wasn’t anything up there and if it was, it was too stinkin’ far to go.  So… we turned back.  Turns out that the lava flow is on the opposite side of the state park… so that was a total waste of a day. The next day we set out to go to the right place.  We made the long drive and got there.  We walked down another road that ended in lava rock.  This time there was just a ranger sitting there and the path was roped off.  He said that after the tsunami in Japan the lava was really flowing and they had “quite a show.”  Then about a week later (a week before we were there) the lava just stopped.  The pressure in the ocean had changed or something because of the tsunami.  There was no lava to see.  The only way to see it was to go up in a helicopter and look straight down into the volcano.  Go figure that one of the most consistent lava flows in the world would stop the week we get there, haha.  Essentially we wasted 2 days trying to find something that didn’t exist. All in all the honeymoon was pretty good.  Its just funny to tell these stories of misfortune because they have become such an expected thing for every trip I take.

We also spent one day doing a photoshoot of ourselves so we could get some big prints for the walls.  We didn’t get to take a whole lot of pictures because it rained that day in several places on the island.  But here are a handful of my favorites!

This isn’t really a wedding pic… but its a cool one

We got home and had a couple days to relax.  Then at midnight… the phone rang and I got a sinking feeling in my stomach.  I found out that my mom had been in a serious wreck and it didn’t sound good.  They were going to have to airlift her to a different hospital.  We rushed out the door to meet the ambulance at the hospital.  As I looked at her laying in the back of the ambulance, I honestly didn’t know if she was going to make it.  They made me get out and we headed to St. Johns where they were airlifting her.  We sat in the waiting room for hours with no updates.  At about 5 or 6 a.m. (I really have no idea) they let us in to see her.  She was stable but she couldn’t talk and they were still waiting on the results of all the tests but they did know that she had aspirated.  They moved her to a room in the ICU where she stayed for several days.  It turns out she had only cracked a rib, bruised her lungs, and bruised pretty much her entire body too.  She was banged up but she was going to make it.  Everyone took turns staying in the ICU but she couldn’t talk and they had her pretty doped up for the pain.

I had a workshop in Austin but I pushed my flight back an extra day so I could spend mother’s day with her.  I had to go to Austin though for our SHOOTERS Workshop because I had missed the one in San Miguel de Allende the week before.  So I made the hard decision and left.  Thankfully the next day she was talking again and a day later they let her out of the hospital.  She is getting better day by day. Anyway, the SHOOTERS Workshop in Austin was great.  Huge thanks to Cory Ryan for hosting it!

Here are some of my favorite pictures!  (I’ve got to wrap this up because I’ve got a session here in a few!)  Be sure to head over to www.shootersworkshops.com and sign up for our Portland workshop in July and stay tuned for SHOOTERS Argentina coming in September!

Arden is the most stylish pregnant woman of all time!

I love creating shadows from ordinary things to make incredible images.  This hallway was pretty boring before I spiced it up!

I was in charge of the light trail and accidentally went over my own face, haha.