Gorgeous, Romantic & Fun Indian Wedding Portrait Session

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The thing about weddings, what makes them so exciting for guests, nerve-wracking for couples, and important for vendors, is that you don’t get any do-overs.

There’s one walk down the aisle, one first kiss, one bouquet, one cake, one set of speeches – you get the gist! And while most couples won’t even notice something small going wrong on the day (a little rain, a missing boutonnière, the flower girl crying through the ceremony), when it comes to the bigger ticket items, it can be a bit heartbreaking when they don’t go to plan.

But today’s gorgeous couple, Bijal & Nirag, are showing us how to make the best of it – in serious style.

Bijal & Nirag tied the knot with a traditional Indian wedding with six events over four days. But when their photographs sadly didn’t come back as they’d hoped, they opted for a do-over. And the results were pretty special.

Returning to the setting of their first date, in Balboa Park in San Diego, the couple had the most romantic post-wedding portrait session with the super talented, Jasmine of Let’s Frolic Together. Wearing colourful traditional Indian wedding attire, this stunning pair smiled throughout, and once you read their sweet love story, I reckon you guys will be smiling along with them.

I’m so glad this couple got the beautiful wedding photos they deserve!

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Our Love Story

We met in August 2012 in San Diego, sort of unexpectedly. I had just moved to San Diego from Chicago for a brief 3-month internship for optometry school.

Nirag’s uncle (who happens to be a good friend of my uncle) was kind enough to let me crash at his house for a few weeks while I got settled in San Diego.

At the same time, Nirag had just moved into this same uncle’s house after a 3000-mile cross country trip from upstate NY to San Diego to start his PhD program at UCSD (Five years later, we are now making the same cross country road trip back to the east coast together!).

The next couple weeks, being new to San Diego, I would make plans to explore the city, to which Nirag would invite himself to. Our first “friend” date happened to be at Balboa Park, which is why we chose it for our engagement photos as well as our wedding re-shoot.

These friendly dates quickly turned into real dates and we spent the next three months creating some amazing memories in this beautiful city.

I moved back to Chicago to finish optometry school while Nirag stayed in SD to finish pursuing his PhD. Finally in March 2014, after one and a half years of a long distance relationship and flying back and forth every month or so, I moved back to San Diego!

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The Proposal

On November 7, 2014, Nirag had sneakily asked one of my good friends to set up a double date for us at Fig Tree Cafe (where Nirag and I had our first date two years prior).

We arrived at the restaurant and were seated by the hostess. (He had asked a friend to hide behind the bar across the restaurant with a camera to capture some in-the-moment proposal photos.)

About 30 minutes passed by and my friend and her husband still had not arrived, so I proceeded to text her to find out how far they were.

Just then, “our song” started playing in the restaurant when Nirag confessed that our friends were actually not coming and he pulled out a ring from his jacket and asked me to marry him!

We left Fig Tree Cafe and headed over to another restaurant, where Nirag had asked all of our friends to meet us at post-proposal to celebrate!

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Photo by Let's Frolic Together via Bridal Musings

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Our Wedding

We got married on November 7, 2015. Our wedding weekend was truly memorable.

We had a traditional four-day long Indian wedding with about six formal events and 300 guests attending.

It was amazing to celebrate with so many of our family and friends who had flown in from all parts of the country, even from India.

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The Photo Session

We definitely didn’t regret anything and were overall very happy with all of our vendors, except our photographer. We had hired him based on his excellent reviews on WeddingWire, Yelp, etc., however, the images we received did not reflect his previously advertised work at all.

They were badly composed, edited, and appeared completely amateur. Not only were images poor, he was completely unprofessional and disrespectful on how he handled our dissatisfaction with the gallery.

We decided to do a re-shoot because we had no images that would be frame-worthy of our walls or even an album.

Our wedding weekend was so colorful, however, the wedding photos we received did not do justice to it at all. Although we could not re-create the entire wedding experience during the re-shoot, we’re so glad we reached out to Jasmine, who provided us with such beautiful images in our original wedding outfits that we will cherish forever.