You may recognize this brown-eyed beauty as the one that’s usually behind the lens, but today Nicole of Sorella Muse is stepping out from her role as photographer and into the role of blogger Bride! She’ll be sharing her journey down the aisle (you guys, she’s eloping in ITALY!!) and to say that we’re beyond excited would be the understatement of the century. Scroll to know all about this lil’ lady below!
Nicole of Sorella Muse… Hi SMP brides! I’m Nicole, a fine art wedding photographer based in Northern California. As someone in the wedding industry, it’s so fun to be joining the bride tribe! When I launched my business four years ago, I checked Style Me Pretty every single day for inspiration, so I’m thrilled to be sharing my wedding planning journey here over the coming months.
Though I love to document love, I was certainly not looking for it when I met my fiancé Daniel in the fall of 2013! I was in my mid-twenties and I just wanted to have fun while dating in Los Angeles. As Daniel likes to remind me, I even forgot about our first date! We were supposed to get coffee in Santa Monica, and 15 minutes beforehand I had to text him that I had failed to put the date in my Google Calendar and was at least an hour away from the cafe. Luckily I was shooting an event that night in Santa Monica, so I asked him to meet me for drinks afterwards at the Viceroy. He thought it was a “pity date” but gladly took it anyways. Three hours in, and we just could not stop talking.
We fell for each other swiftly and completely. Our third date was like a page out of The Notebook—we spent the day laughing, talking, holding hands at the beach and then kissing in the waves. I remember thinking, this can’t be real! On another early date, I told him my favorite poet was Pablo Neruda. Without skipping a beat he started reciting—in Spanish—my favorite Neruda poem. How does that even happen?! Meeting someone who is so deeply my match, someone with a generous spirit who loves literature and traveling as much as I do, makes me feel blessed beyond measure.
Daniel proposed a year to the day we met. I thought everything romantic that was planned was for our anniversary! We arrived for a weekend at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco and there were gorgeous flowers, fancy chocolates, and champagne waiting in the room. Then he played Spanish guitar for me while I sat beside him feeling so in love. We walked to a park to find a bench to journal together (we both love to write!) but all the benches in the park had people sitting on them. I kept saying, it’s fine, let’s go sit there. But he persisted in looking for somewhere more private, which I was so confused by. Finally he found a rock beneath a tree and said, let’s sit here. Once we crawled up onto this massive rock, he handed me an Italian leather journal with our initials and said, Will you marry me? Inside, on the first two pages, there were two poems written out in calligraphy, and on the following pages, he had written me a beautiful love letter. It was like something out of a Jane Austen novel. Since then, we have been writing each other letters back and forth in the same leather journal as a record of our engagement.
We had decided on a trip instead of a ring before Daniel proposed. We traveled to Spain and Morocco for two incredible weeks, and I’m still so glad we chose to celebrate our engagement in a way that fit us perfectly. Daniel also donated funds to have a water well built in Cambodia, which we later visited while traveling in Southeast Asia. I was so moved that he had found this charitable organization doing remarkable work and made our engagement story about something bigger than ourselves.
With our love of travel adventures, it has come as no surprise to our nearest and dearest that we are throwing an intimate destination wedding weekend! I can’t wait to share my bride to be perspective as a wedding photographer, the process of planning a destination wedding, how we chose our budget priorities, and everything else along the way!
Photography: Kristina Adams Photography | Blogger Bride: Sorella Muse