SOUTH ASIAN INDIAN WEDDING: ANAND + TAMARA

This was certainly my biggest wedding of the year and perhaps the most challenging to shoot.  Over three days, four if you count the bridal session that was shot on Tuesday and all the travelling involved between Houston and San Antonio, Anand and Tamara became husband and wife.

Anand and Tamara live and work in the Netherlands, Europe and officially married just months earlier in Tamara’s birth country of Hungary. Anand is originally from Houston, Texas and so, this is where the Indian wedding took place at The Houstonian Hotel, Houston, Texas.   This was a very special wedding for me as it was a very kind referral from Sunila Sahni, the mother of Rohini who I was lucky enough to photograph her wedding just 18 months earlier. And Rohini was there too, in from New York, which was just brilliant.

No surprising then that I love Indian weddings. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t.  The extraordinary colors, sounds, traditions, family, food, the details. Yes, it’s a photographers delight. But what really makes it special for me is the people as I study and document the emotionally ups and downs of the day.  The bigger the wedding, the more challenging this can be.  I had already decided in my minds eye that most of the wedding would be in color.

We  start on Thursday with Tamara and Anand’s engagement ceremony followed by the arrival of the groom’s party at the residence, followed on Friday with pre wedding celebrations and then Saturday with the Hindu wedding. The pre-ceremony starts with the Baraat, a wedding procession full of drums and celebrations which reaches a meeting point where the elders of both parties meet.

Special thanks to the lovely Jo Ann and John Woodward (love John’s dry humor), wedding planners of Schwartz and Woodward and Adam Swift, my fellow Brit and second shooter who flew in from his home in L.A.

Images captured with a Leica M9 and a Nikon D3.  Leave your comments below and see a few of my favorites shot over three days.