The Cape’s dark stone and warm wood opened to the Pacific, El Arco keeping its quiet place on the horizon. The wind did what it always does here: tested every veil, lifted every corner of linen, carried voices just far enough to sound like music.
It was a very small wedding, the kind that fits in two hands. Alexa is a model, the kind of beautiful that doesn’t announce itself light just finds her and stays. They flew in a makeup artist, and still she kept everything easy and natural, as if the day had asked for no more than her real face. Lee adored her; it showed in every pause between them. She adored him back. Photographing that kind of symmetry is like walking downhill gravity does the work.
The rehearsal dinner on the 8th felt like the first page of a favorite book. The terrace glowed, glass caught the last color from the sea, and their families so sweet, so genuinely kind folded them into a circle of stories. I kept close to hands: a mother smoothing a stray hair, a father tracing a line on the rim of his glass while he remembered something important, siblings leaning in to hear the punchline. The Cape’s geometry turned every candle into two candles, every smile into a reflection.
On the 9th, getting ready with Alexa meant standing near a window while the makeup artist drew out what was already there. Her dress I loved that dress clean lines that made room for the way she moves. She laughed at the way the wind kept flirting with her veil; we let it. Down the hall, Lee straightened a cuff, then forgot about it the second he heard her voice.
They married with the Pacific breathing behind them. Waves hit the black rock and threw silver up into the air; vows settled like warm light. The guest list was small enough that every face mattered, every cheer had a name. After, we walked the edge of the property where the stone turns to tide. The wind lifted her hair; he reached to tuck it back and didn’t. It was perfect untidy and true.
The party felt like a well-tuned secret: music sliding out over the pool, laughter bouncing off concrete and teak, glasses clinking in a rhythm that needed no band. Alexa and Lee danced the way they talked with a little space and then no space at all. I worked the reflections: their silhouettes on the water, city lights braided into the surf, a soft echo of them in every pane of glass.
For the last frame, I asked them to stand where El Arco sits just right between shoulders. “Hold,” I said, and they did foreheads touching, her dress catching the wind one more time, his hand resting like a promise he’d already kept. Click. The ocean kept talking. The night agreed. They had the kind of fun that leaves a trace in the air, and when we said goodbye, it felt less like an ending and more like a door left gently open.
