Trystan Photography: An Intimate Portrait.

Please click the photo or follow the link to view Charissa and Diego’s wedding at the Westlake Village Inn in Westlake Village, CA.

As a photographer in Colorado, would you consider shooting a wedding in Los Angeles?

The answer might seem obvious to some, but for me there was actually a moment’s hesitation. I spent nearly five years of my young adult life in Los Angeles, and let’s just say, I’m delighted I don’t live there anymore!

I was truly lost during my years in LA, wandering from whim to whim, sometimes making terrible life choices in a city full of slick idolatry and plastic people. As anyone who has been to Hollywood can attest, like its residents, Los Angeles has a shimmering veneer many initially can find very intoxicating, but dig even the slightest bit under the surface, she reveals herself to be the perfect metaphor for all the burnt-out, over the hill actors with too much plastic surgery that mar it’s population like liver spots.

As you can clearly tell, Los Angeles’ faux glitz and glamor soured tremendously for me, and I honestly thought I’d never have a positive view of it, or it’s people, again.

However, there is a certain universal fantasy about one’s career in photography that at some fantastic point your art begins to take you to new places other than your usual creative stomping grounds. New places breathe fresh life into your art, especially a place as alive and full of energy (both good and bad) as the greater LA metro area!

Char and I briefly pondered this decision, but we quickly came to realize that as beautiful and majestic as Colorado can be, a little change of scenery / mini vacation might do us some good. So we agreed to travel out over a weekend in July and spend a total of 3 days in California, with the actual wedding falling on the Sunday, and we’d fly out on Monday.

I have to admit, I was fairly nervous about trying to pull off an amazing wedding over a thousand miles away, but as we looked at the logistics of it all, we realized we really didn’t require that much equipment and much of it could be done as a carry-on (we thought that sacrificing our clothing instead of the camera equipment to the lost-luggage-gods might be a good choice). And luckily, Charissa had the foresight to book our flight before the fuel prices “how-dare-you-want-to-check-a-bag!?!” fiasco became airline policy, so while the fellow travelers ahead of and behind us were furiously bartering with the poor ticket counter people to let them check their bags without paying a surcharge, Charlotte and I were greeted with knowing smiles as we loaded our 4 checked bags without paying a dime. I have to say, that was a small thing, but it was a fortuitous start to our little adventure.

Charissa was amazing in her efforts to coordinate our travel plans: our early morning flight out of Denver arrived at the gate right on time, and we were out of LAX in a rental car within minutes (that’s never happened to me coming into LAX, ever…) and we found ourselves with some time to kill on our first day in LA. Charlotte has never really been around LA (even though we were married there, we didn’t have much time after the nuptials to for me to show her around the old stomping grounds), so we made our first day a date on the ol’ megalopolis.

We took a breathtaking stroll through the Huntington Library and Gardens, which happened to have a photographic history of Los Angeles on show (quite appropraite, I thought), and that night we had the best meal of our entire lives at Carousel, my favorite restaurant of all time from when I lived in Glendale. It’s as authentic Mediterranean/ Lebanese fare as you’ll ever find (and I’ve tried), and we dined and talked and drank and laughed like we hadn’t done since before we had kids.

Later that night, with quadruple-boiled Armenian coffee coursing through my veins, we flew back to our hotel at the usual breakneck speeds of the 101. While dodging BMW and Bentley drivers who seemingly couldn’t care less if I was next to them on the road, I would gaze over at my beautiful wife as she sat in the passenger seat, silhouetted against the shimmering, dizzying backdrop of the city lights. And for the first time in the five long years since I’d left LA, I felt a long-forgotten sensation as a memory of this perfect night suddenly formed and settled-in amongst the negative mental rubbish of my former life in LA.

I fell asleep that night remembering that I’d felt the same way on our honeymoon night in the Renaissance Hotel in Hollywood. Charlotte represents everything that is right and good in my life, and by beginning my life anew through our marriage in LA, we had unknowingly begun some kind of cathartic recovery process of my memories from those darker LA days.

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