With a penchant for the dramatic, is it any wonder that I went a little gaga over Brie & Leonard alpine wedding? The black wedding dress, the intimate ceremony, the epic mountain top photographs…I love it all! The bride even had a rams skull (yes really!) instead of a bouquet.
“Basically our story goes like this,” the bride began, “Leonard and I are not really conventional people and despite a few failed ideas to do things more traditionally we quickly discovered that your wedding is not the time to be what you are not. So we followed our hearts to our dream wedding in New Zealand. Leonard proposed to me on the top of a New Zealand mountain in the snow, which was just magical, so we decided that a snowy mountain would make the perfect place for our wedding. We had no guests so we decided to use a helicopter to travel to a completely isolated place with no road access.”
The bride wore a black wedding dress which she made herself. She also made her own headpiece and even her shoes! “I had tried on about 100 different white/cream/ivory dresses but regardless of the style or how beautiful they were they just didn’t feel right,” Brie continued. “Black is what suited me so I ignored tradition. I had a design idea and I wanted my dress to be unique so I decided to make it myself. The only problem was I didn’t know how to sew! I had a sewing machine and a lovely lady in the local fabric shop with advice, somehow I stumbled my way through the rest. A strapless dress in the snow probably wasn’t wise but I put heat pads in my shoes and gloves, wore three pairs of stockings and survived on adrenalin.”
With such an intimate wedding (just the two of them!) it was important to the couple that they had an amazing wedding photographer to capture their day. That way all their friends and family back home could see how wonderful their wedding was. “Other than us, the most crucial thing about our wedding was our photographer. We chose to use Anna from Alpine Images because her work stood out as art rather than mere photography. When we asked if she would do our photography for us, we asked that she ignore the fact that it was a wedding and look at creating individual pieces of art. We gave her a few guidelines about the mood we wanted to create and left the rest to her. We are so glad we did because combining her imagination and talent we ended up with magnificent photos. It also gave us a fantastic day, sneaking up to Sunday church sessions to pose with a rams skull, down dirty alleyways, in concrete car parks, and in the back doors of unattended bars – all Anna’s ideas! Everyone who has seen our photos asks about the rams skull and why we had it.”
“Our wedding was all about us and our love for each other,” Brie concluded. “It was very romantic and I’m so glad we rocked it out in our own way!”
Awesome awesome awesome! Thank you so much to Brie & Leonard and their photographer Anna for sharing this wedding with us today.
