Destination Wedding – Big Island Hawaii: Anisha and Harrison

I’m so excited to share with you Anisha and Harrison’s wedding. The couple planned a small wedding with their closest friends on Big Island in Hawaii. I was lucky enough to photograph their beautiful wedding. Make sure scroll down and take a look at the portraits we took.

Also, I asked Anisha and Harrison about their wedding. Here are their heartfelt responses:

What lead you to have a wedding the way you did? Family, friends location etc?

Harrison: A lot of our guests were traveling from abroad, anyway, and we wanted to have a series of wonderful memories with our closest family and friends. Hawaii has a very fond place in Anisha’s heart and she wanted to share it with me and our loved ones.

Anisha: It was freeing to realize that we could truly do whatever we wanted for our wedding. It was also a bit scary, since it meant we didn’t have any real guidelines to work with… Neither of us had thought much of what our eventual wedding day would be like, so we didn’t know what we wanted.

However, we figured out that an equally good question to ask one another was, “what don’t you want?” Absolutely no dry, cardboard-flavored fancy wedding cake. We didn’t want a DJ and dancing. Definitely not a resort wedding. No fake flowers. Harrison’s father had recently undergone treatment for cancer, which made him very photosensitive and heat sensitive. I love ice cream perhaps more than life itself. So, we got married on a small coffee farm in a misty rain forest-esque area of the big island. We enjoyed ice cream sundaes, noshed on wood-fired pizza and Indian food, played lawn games and tie-dyed shirts together.

Q – What were you most excited about before the wedding?

Harrison and Anisha: We were most excited to see all of our close friends and family in one place, mixing and mingling together. It was like watching many chapters of each our lives suddenly brought together.

Anisha: I was also really excited for the ice cream sundaes. We had special ordered ice cream from a Hawaiian creamery, which I had remembered loving as a kid. (And yes, it did live up to my memories!)

Also, I was really excited to make my vows to Harrison. I’d put a lot of thought into what I wanted to vow to him.

Q – Did anything happened that you were’t expecting?

Anisha: There was a part of the Hindu ceremony where we asked all of our guests to come up and bless our marriage.  I was worried that people would be too shy or uncertain to step forward. However, to my absolute delight, two of our friends bounded up immediately to bless us, and within seconds everyone had hopped up to join the queue to put flowers on our heads and bless us. It was far and away my favorite moment in the ceremony. Hearing everyone’s greetings and wishes for us was absolutely incredible.

Also, we had decided to have a tie dye station for our guests to dye shirts that we’d hand-designed. I knew that I’d love it, but I wasn’t expecting that everyone else would be so excited about tie dying! It was the biggest hit at the reception, regardless of age!

Harrison: I was very nervous for our ceremonies, but when the time came, I found that I was completely comfortable and felt right at home. That in itself really surprised me.

Q – When you look back, would you have changed anything?

Anisha: Harrison and I had planned to do a ring warming before the Christian ceremony. Unfortunately in all the hustle and bustle of wedding planning and last minute mile disasters, we completely forgot to organize the ring warming. By the morning of, it seemed a bit much to ask our best man to figure out how to make a ring warming happen. I wish we had spent a little more time before arriving in Hawaii carefully planning out our timeline and ensuring that we had remembered all parts of our ceremony.

Anisha and Harrison: We also wish that we had done a one week check up on all of our vendors. We realized that some of the vendors that we hadn’t been working closely with (for example, the bus company) hadn’t prepared quite as much as we had expected. If we were to do this over, we would check in with all our vendors to ensure that they’d prepared for their tasks. For example, we would have verified that the bus company had reviewed the requested route, printed a map and ensured that they could stop at pre-agreed upon pickup and drop off areas.

We would have also budgeted more time for everyone to get ready.

Vendors:

Wedding Coordinator & Venue: Kate Hickey/Sunshower Farms
Flowers, Bouquet and Boutineers : Lyla Mah
Flowers, Leis: Grace Flowers Hawaii
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So very beautiful and wonderful memories for a lifetime.

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