The Dream Team

Invitations & Stationary by:  Paper Damsels

Design , Decor & Floral by: Rachel A. Clingen

Makeup & Hair by: Blush & Brush

Cakes & Cookies by: The Cocoa Cakery

Photography by: Erika & Ryan Rowell Photography

If you love the look of this shoot and wish to see more, pick up the latest issue of Elegant Wedding Magazine where this style shoot is featured. Or just hire this entire team to recreate this look for your wedding.

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   Equestrian Style Shoot
2. 

   Shelby & Derrick – Gibson Center Wedding – Alliston, ON
3. 

   Natalie & Phil – Delta Rocky Crest Resort – Muskoka, ON

Thank You Junebug Weddings!

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   Lindsay & Angela at The Abbey for the Arts – Glen Nevis, ON
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   The Inn at Christies Mill Wedding – Port Severn, ON
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   Jody & Greg at The Westwind, Buckhorn, ON

Enjoy.

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   Elegant Wedding Magazine Feature
2. 

   Honored
3. 

   Kelly & Wayne – Niagara-On-The-Lake Engagement

Happy 1 year anniversary.

Erika & Ryan

You can pick up the latest issue of Elegant Wedding Magazine at Chapters, and pretty much where ever magazines are sold in Canada.

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   Perfect Wedding Magazine Feature
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   Weddingbells featurette
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   Liz & Steve Just Because – Cheltenham Badlands, ON

The image was from Jonathan & Emma’s McLean House wedding last October. Jonathan & Emma are now expecting a baby girl in September. Congratulation to you both!

You can pick up the latest issue at Chapters, and pretty much where ever magazines are sold in Canada.

Erika & Ryan

You may be interested in:

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   Elegant Wedding Magazine Feature
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   Commercial Portraits
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   Newborn Portraits – Sophie

This is just a short little post. We were pretty excited when one of our images was featured in a Russian Wedding Magazine. We have no clue what it says, but we are in good company, from what we can tell it talks about a few wedding planning companies and has a few images from some great photographers in Russia and Eastern Europe. We think its the coolest thing ever! Canadians like us don’t get images featured in Russian wedding magazines everyday.

The image comes from Ryan and Tara’s Prague wedding.We only have a scan of the magazine, so if anyone out there can read the words off the images below and let us know the name of this Russian wedding magazine so we can order one online, that would be wonderful, we would appreciate that so much. Just leave your translations in the comments section below. Online translators are not very helpful.

First is the photo they featured from Tara & Ryan’s destination wedding in Prague, Czech Republic.

You may be interested in:

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   Perfect Wedding Magazine Feature
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   Elegant Wedding Magazine Feature
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   Weddingbells featurette

The show stopped in Saint John N.B where my mother lives and she went down to the show and photographed the installation for us. We are so honored to be featured in such an important movement.

The first photo below is the the image of Kyle at Ronald McDonald House and the installation images were taken by my beautiful mother.

E & R

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   Melissa & Rob at The Berkeley Church – Toronto Wedding
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   John & Amy – Windermere House Wedding – Muskoka, ON

So here are more images that maybe you never saw in WedLuxe Magazine, but still some of our favorites.

Cheers
Erika & Ryan

The Monique Lhullier wedding dress.

The Manolo Blahnik shoes

We had perfect weather for an outdoor Muskoka ceremony.

This is the pro shop at Taboo Resort, it photographs pretty nicely.

The stunning tent at Taboo Resort.

One of Ryan and I shooting

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   Alison & Dan – Taboo Resort Wedding, Muskoka
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   Blue Mountain Resort Wedding – Collingwood, ON
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   Natalie & Phil – Delta Rocky Crest Resort – Muskoka, ON

We were floored and so honored by the announcement. Ryan and I both turned to each other and basically said “Well it helps when we have the best clients in the world!”

We are so thankful and lucky to get the chance to do what we love everyday being wedding photographers, but even more so we are thankful for the inspiration our clients give to us. Without all of you, we would never have made such a list.

THANK YOU

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   Kelly & Wayne – Niagara Falls Wedding
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   One on One Mentoring for Photographers
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   Honored

Some of our friends and their amazing designs can be found in this issue of the magazine too. Lori has a full page cake, and Elizabeth has a full page bouquet.
The Caketress – Lori Hutchinson and Elizabeth Johnston eventdecorator.com

Happy Reading

E & R

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   Muskoka Weddings – Style Shoot
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   Equestrian Style Shoot
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   Liz & Steve Just Because – Cheltenham Badlands, ON

The exhibition has its own website (www.photosensitive.com/cc), which displays all of the photos and was recently featured on CBC’s News: Sunday show (the clip can be seen at . It is planned to visit 5 provinces this year and three in 2010.
They aim to correspond with this summer’s Calgary stampede and 2010′s Vancouver Olympics. They also aim to have a grand finale in Ottawa in 2010. The aims of the exhibition are to raise awareness of cancer and to be a testimony to survivors and victims of the disease.

Rowell Photography, along with a huge number of our photography friends and many other photographers from across the country will be featured in this amazing exhibition.

We chose the photos from our session with Kyle and his family from back in May 2008 at Toronto’s Ronald McDonald House.
We wanted to showcase photos that were special to us, and that didn’t focus in on the disease as much as they focused in on a child who is very much full of life.

These are some of our favorite portraits ever, and we are so honored and excited to be apart of this exhibition.

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   Melissa & Rob at The Berkeley Church – Toronto Wedding

Ryan and I were approached by Cathy Gulli of MacLean’s to comment on the growing American photography trend, the purpose of the article was to take a Canadian spin on the concept and see what Canadian photographers thought of the idea, and whether or not it was an up and coming trend in our neck of the woods.

In the article proposal photography gets slammed by the opinions and negative words of some online bloggers, calling it creepy and narcissistic, a huge slam comes from William Saletan on slate.com that says “It’s another creepy thing that men do to women” and another slam came from a woman on jezebel.com “most women don’t want to be photographed without their permission, and they usually like to keep these life-altering moments to themselves.”

Now when I was reading this article out loud to Ryan at Wal-Mart the other night we were both a little stunned at the negative turn the article took. Proposal photography is a new idea and just like all new ideas there is going to be a backlash of haters and the opinions of people who have yet to experience this new idea. So to shed a positive light on proposal photography and hopefully drum up some willing, lovestruck, about to proposee’s, we thought we would share with you our complete opinion (that was not completely documented in the MacLean’s article) on proposal photography.

Ryan and I share the same views on photography, and on love, and we know that is why we have chosen to document love and people for a living. It is really something special about documenting a couple in love on their wedding day, it’s like watching a movie where you get to interact with the main characters as the story pans out. You see emotions come out of brides and grooms that they have been harboring their whole lives, emotions they have been waiting and dreaming to experience and share with their friends and families. That’s why we love shooting weddings, because we love to watch the huge anticipation of an entire lifetime of emotions come together.

But what wedding emotion lacks is that moment of pure surprise and instant overwhelming behavior that only comes with the biggest question one can ask another person that they love, “Will You Marry Me?” and then followed by shrieks and tears of happiness.

Why wouldn’t you want to relive that? It is pure and raw emotion, and it happens to couples everyday.

Ryan and I spend a lot of time looking at our massive collection of old family photographs and the ones we cherish the most are the ones of our grandparents and great grandparents caught in a moment, not the beautiful portraits. We love these images more because they tell us something about the people in the photos, they give us a window into the personalities of the people never knew or never had the chance to experience our grown up lives with. It’s really unfortunate that photography in the past wasn’t always capable of capturing split second moments, or sequences of photos, or that journalistic photography trends were non-existent when it came to photographing weddings or life’s special events. We believe that the reason why people have this dying urge to document every moment of their lives in an emotional and natural way is simply because they now can. We believe that people want to leave their mark on this world and within their families, we, just like many others want our future children and their future families to have that emotional connection with the past through photographs that show who we really are.

Proposal photography to us, is just as important as any other style of photography. It is one of life’s stepping stones, and I know that I would personally give anything to see photos from the moment my grandparents decided that they would spend the rest of their lives together. Documenting life’s moments not only our job, but also our passion, and having another creative outlet like proposal photography to document the lives of people in love is just the icing on the cake for us.

We want to thank Cathy Gulli for asking us to be apart of her article, if you wish to read the entire article, you need to pick up a copy of MacLean’s Magazine this week.

We hope that this post has shone some positive light on a really cool, new photography trend, and we hope that anyone interested in capturing this special moment will give us a call.

Erika & Ryan

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   The way we were
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   Elegant Wedding Magazine Feature
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   Perfect Wedding Magazine Feature