My love affair with wedding photography began with the re-discovery of my own parents’ wedding album around the time that I bought my first professional camera and was setting out to be a fashion photographer. I had flipped through it as a child, but had been too young to fully appreciate it until I paged through it as an adult. I was blown away.

Unlike most couples who got married in 1977 who have a handful of stiff posed photographs, my parents had hired a friend who was a newspaper photographer to photograph the wedding, and the result is an amazing collection of totally documentary black & white images that capture my parents exactly as they were: Young, fun, a little wild, and a little poor, but incredibly happy and ridiculously in love.

The rest of my family is there too - My grandmother who passed away while my mother was still pregnant with me, battling cancer at the time of the wedding, but pictured laughing and having a great time, dressed up in a fabulous fur hat and looking overjoyed to be seeing her daughter getting married. My favorite uncle, every inch the young hell-raiser in his dark glasses and an altar boy’s robe on the steps of the Saint Louis Cathedral. Even my mother’s famously stoic former Navy Admiral father, caught with a tear on his cheek betraying his stern expression.

These are images that my sisters and I will cherish forever. And from looking at the expressions on my parents’ faces the next day as they flipped through the album again for the first time in years, I know that they will too. Even now, 35 years later, my parents are still one of the happiest and most in-love couples I know. I want every couple, and every daughter to have what I have – a beautiful and timeless record of an amazing time in their or their parents’ lives that they can look back on decades later with as much joy as I do.

I want to be the one to tell that story.

Although my background is in fashion, my heart is in weddings. The contrast is like is like night and day. With fashion photography, a lot of time and effort goes into making models looks as aloof and unapproachable as possible. With weddings, I get to focus on capturing something real and human, on getting to know people, and on telling an important story about their lives. I work to capture each subject’s personality and to document the day as it unfolds naturally, with minimal interference. I strive to capture the moments that will make each couple laugh and cry for years to come, and all too frequently find myself starting to tear up behind the camera, too.

True to that mission, all of my packages include full wedding coverage. I’m there to document your wedding, not to watch the clock. Whether you’re having a simple outdoor ceremony in California or a 5-day blowout in India, I’ll be one of the first ones there while you’re getting ready, and I’ll be the last one to leave at the end of night. Get in touch with me. Let me tell your story.

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Grace Havlak is a Hollywood and San Francisco based wedding photographer. An Honors Graduate of The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), she has worked at places ranging from the Alexander McQueen design house in London to the MTV Wardrobe Department in New York City, before picking up a camera in 2007 and settling down in California to pursue photography full time. She has photographed happy couples everywhere from New York to New Delhi and just about everywhere in between. Her work has been featured on Style Me Pretty, one of the top blogs in the wedding world. She currently flits back and forth between San Francisco and Hollywood, where she lives in a charming old 1920’s building with her collection of vintage wedding dresses and her very cute, but very naughty cat named Sebastian, who ironically has developed a taste for tulle and lace. When she is not behind the camera (which, frankly, is her favorite place to be), she keeps busy sewing, baking, vintage shopping, thrift storing, reading 19th century Russian novels, and spending more time on planes than she does asleep.