Jasmine and Thomas booked us well in advance, and I was more excited about it than I let on at the time. In eighteen years behind a camera I had never photographed a wedding at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

The permit most couples don't know about

The first thing I told them was that the Garden requires a photography permit. Most couples have no idea, and it is exactly the kind of detail that turns into a problem at the gate when nobody has dealt with it. They handled it. They covered our parking too.

That sounds like a small thing. It isn't. It meant that from the moment we arrived, the day could be about photographs instead of logistics.

I thought the beds would be bare

It was the twenty-fifth of April and it was cold.

I spent the drive out convinced we were going to find bare beds and brown branches. Chicago spring does whatever it wants, and I have been caught out by it before. I had already started working out how we would shoot around it.

I was wrong. The garden was in full bloom. The tulips were out. The flowering trees were heavy with blossom, and when Jasmine and Thomas sat down on a bench underneath one of them, that was the picture.

Being wrong about this was the best thing that happened all day.

The day they actually wanted

This was not a wedding that ran from eight in the morning until midnight. There was no getting-ready coverage. There was no ceremony to follow, no processional, no timeline pinned to somebody else's schedule. Jasmine and Thomas wanted the garden, and then they wanted dinner with their family. That was the day.

I want to be clear that this is a real wedding day and not a smaller version of one. More of our couples choose something like this than you would think. What you give up in hours you get back in attention — three and a half hours where nobody is being hurried to the next thing, and both of us working the whole time.

We shot by the lake. We shot through the tulips. He was in a green suit, she was in a long white dress, and most of what we did was stay out of the way of how they looked at each other.

Everyone had their phone out

The thing I remember that isn't in any of our photographs is the guests.

Every time we set up, the people who had come with them were pulling out their phones and photographing Jasmine and Thomas themselves. Not politely waiting for us to finish — properly photographing them, from every angle, delighted about it.

I have been at weddings where that would have irritated me. This wasn't that. It told me something about the two of them: they are loved by the people around them, and everybody there wanted their own copy of that afternoon. You can see it in our frames too. I just noticed it in the phones first.

Al Bahaar, and a room with no light

From the garden we drove out to Al Bahaar in Orland Park.

The room they had reserved was long and narrow — it almost read as a hallway when I first walked in — with the tables set facing each other down its length. And the light in there was not good. It rarely is in a restaurant. Restaurants are lit for dinner, not for photographs.

So we worked with what the room gave us. The pictures from inside Al Bahaar came out moody, and I think they are better for it. They look like what it felt like to be in there: a family packed close around a long table, everyone talking at once, nobody performing for a camera. We took the family portraits outside where there was light, and the two sets sit together well — the bright ones and the dark ones, the same evening from two directions.

The food was Mediterranean and it was excellent. Mariola and I are not neutral on Mediterranean food.

What I would do again

All of it. We would go back to the Botanic Garden tomorrow.

And I would be a lot less sure of myself about the flowers.