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Congrats to Fritz and Winnie, who were married right before Christmas last year on a cold winter day, on a frozen lake in front of a castle made of ice. Not everyone can say they’ve done that.

We started the day in Canmore, where both Fritz and Winnie were getting ready. Unlike western wedding traditions, where the groom doesn’t have to worry about much more than getting dressed and showing up on time, Chinese weddings have some really fun little challenges for the groom to overcome before he can even see his bride-to-be. In this case, it meant that Fritz had to do pushups while singing something from his laptop and then he read some prank vows written by Winnie’s brother—stuff like sticking with her if she went bald and her teeth all fell out—through the door to Winnie to convince her to come out. The whole thing was a lot of fun, with Winnie’s family there making sure he did it all properly and chuckling at him as he went through with it all.

Once Fritz had completed the pranks and challenges there were Chinese tea ceremonies with each of their parents. I love how the tea ceremonies involve their parents, with everyone else gathered around as well. There is a strong family atmosphere to the whole thing.

After the Chinese tea ceremonies we drove up to Lake Louise for the western wedding ceremony, which was held on the frozen lake behind the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise. It’s a gorgeous location, the hotel—which looks more like a castle—and the lake are ringed by mountains and forest and the lake has a castle built of ice sitting right on it. It was truly a winter wedding, with steady snow and temperatures down to around -20℃ with the wind chill. And the ladies wore skirts and dresses! I don’t know how they did it without freezing! I had about a billion layers of clothing and Winnie and Fritz didn’t even have winter coats on. Love kept them warm.

We did all of their photos around the Fairmont. Fritz and Winnie were fantastic and happy to brave the cold for some outside photos, but it was too cold to stay out for long and so we ended up doing quite a lot of the portrait photography inside the hotel. Fortunately, the Chateau Lake Louise is an amazing location for photography!

Congrats again, Fritz and Winnie. All the best.

Happy New Year!

Thanks to all our clients from 2009! I have put together a very quick little slideshow of some of my favourite wedding and bridal session images of 2009. I tried to keep it down to only three images per wedding—which was really hard!—but this is meant to be just a glimpse. More images from each wedding can be found on the blog under the weddings category. The one exception is the very last set of wedding photos, because this is a recent wedding that I haven’t even blogged yet, so I thought I’d give them a few more photos in the slideshow. I’ll be blogging the whole wedding soon.

There are three photos from Jessica and three from James Day and the rest are from me. I also need to thank Sherri, Trent, and Doug for assisting and shooting with me this year as well; their help was invaluable to me. There are a lot of portraits in this mix, because I put so much work into them that it’s hard to not choose them as my favourites. And there aren’t really any detail photos in here, either, because this is all about the people!

Click on the play arrow below to start the slideshow. Have a great 2010.