Jake Holt Photography - Austin, Texas Photographer » hotel saint cecilia

3 months of stuff and things…

Jake H — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 07:57:28 +0000

Finally! A very belated post featuring a few of my favorite non-wedding day shoots from the last 3 months – portrait sessions of every shape and size. I’m incredibly excited to get some of this stuff up for public viewing at last – since I’ve been spending the last 6 months or so working on developing some new looks and techniques and using a number of new locations, well, I guess you could say that this marks the official unveiling of a season’s worth of experimentation…

Jess & Justin | Austin, Texas | January 3rd, 2010

Jake H — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 07:30:43 +0000

So, I went to a portrait session and a wedding broke out! Jess and Justin’s session was without a doubt one of the most unforgettable shoots of my life – not because of the awesome location, Austin’s own Hotel Saint Cecilia, one of my absolute favorite settings, but because of the unexpected way in which the day unfolded. This requires a bit of backstory – Jess and Justin are both in the military and were due to ship out in about 10 days, with plans to get married when they returned. They were originally going to two very different locations - Jess to Spain, and Justin to Alaska. However, they discovered that if they were married prior to shipping out that they could be assigned to the same place, so plans were made to have a small private ceremony at Mt. Bonnell, officiated by Justin’s best friend, with a full-sized wedding taking place when they return from their assignments. When someone is willing to give up living in Spain to come live with you in Alaska, you know you have something special! Anyway, our original plan was to spend a couple of hours shooting around the South Congress area, and then for Jess, Justin and friends to head to Mt. Bonnell for the ceremony. Well, mother nature didn’t like that plan, so we headed back to St. Cecilia for the shoot in order to avoid the rain. As the rain continued and plans for a Mt. Bonnell ceremony began to look bleak, the decision was made to have the ceremony on the patio of their room at St. Cecilia and, since I was there with my cameras and all, well, of course I photographed the ceremony as well! It was such a change of pace not having hundreds of guests watching, and I felt very lucky to be a part of something so unique and intimate. Congrats guys, I hope you enjoy Alaska…you can always go visit Spain on your honeymoon!

Courtney’s Bridals | Austin, Texas | September 2nd, 2009

Jake H — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:11:54 +0000

Courtney’s bridal session was a perfect example of making lemonade when life hands you apricots – when our original plans of shooting at the Capitol and The Driskill fell through in the preceding week, we came up with a plan B of Lustre Pearl and Hotel Saint Cecilia. And I can say, with one billion percent certainty, that things turned out better that way…

Martha & Cody | Austin, Texas | August 29th, 2009

Jake H — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 02:57:12 +0000

Martha and Cody went 3 for 3 on their wedding day – a great ceremony location in St. Mary’s, the retro-funky Hotel St. Cecilia for their post-ceremony pics, and the courtyard and rooftop of The Belmont for their reception. Awesomely fun. Also, an awesomely huge quantity of photos – Alison and I started shooting at 11:00 a.m. and finished up a little after midnight, ending up with a mind-boggling 56 gigabytes worth of photos. To the non-techies out there, that’s pretty much equivalent to a photo for every star in the galaxy, or something approximating that.