LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - Every once in a while, somebody hires you and then makes you question what the hell you’ve been doing.

Keri did that to me.

Not because she disliked our photography.

Quite the opposite.

She loved it.

But she had a very specific vision for her wedding.

The 1970s.

Not disco balls glued to everything until the room looked like a themed restaurant.

She wanted the wedding to feel like it belonged to another decade.

The clothes.

The colors.

The architecture.

The atmosphere.

The photographs.

And on March 15, 2025, Keri and Zachary got married at the Kim Sing Theatre in Los Angeles with a wedding that somehow managed to feel glamorous, funky, romantic, moody, playful—and strangely unstuck from time.

By the end of it, even I wasn't entirely sure what year we were in.

This conversation actually happened before Keri ever booked us.

She already loved our photography.

That part mattered.

But she had this very specific vision for her wedding and asked whether we could push our normal editing style toward something that felt more 1970s.

My first instinct was basically:

No.

I had worked hard developing what I considered the Black Rider Studios look.

Moody.

Ethereal.

Dark.

Dreamy.

Romantic.

You spend years figuring out what your photography should look like, and once you finally start recognizing yourself in it, changing the recipe can feel like somebody asking you to mess with the one thing you finally figured out.

But Keri wasn't asking us to become another photographer.

She was coming to us because she already loved what we did.

She just wanted to know whether her 70s vision could live inside it.

And around that time, I had started becoming more open-minded about the way I approached my own work.

So before saying yes, I experimented.

I took photographs from a previous wedding and started playing with the idea.

Just to see what would happen.

And then something annoying happened.

I loved it.

That experiment gave me the confidence to tell Keri:

Yeah. We can do this.

Not by abandoning Black Rider Studios.

By bending it.

Keri had the vision before we ever arrived.

The Kim Sing Theatre made sense because she didn't have to fight the building to make that vision work.

There was already character in the architecture.

Brick.

Warm wood.

Palms.

Old shapes.

Dark corners.

A courtyard that didn't feel like it was designed last Thursday by somebody following the current wedding trend cycle.

The building already had enough of that 70s personality in it.

Keri and Zachary just stepped into it.

Then their wardrobe pushed everything further.

Zachary in brown.

Keri in lace.

That blue around her eyes.

The flowers.

The colors.

Suddenly it wasn't a modern wedding desperately trying to cosplay as vintage.

It just felt right.

And that's an important difference.

If you have to explain the theme every five minutes, something probably isn't working.

This one didn't need explaining.

Throughout the wedding, Keri and Zachary were inseparable.

Happy.

Affectionate.

Always finding their way back toward each other.

That matters because you can build the greatest visual concept imaginable and still end up with photographs that feel empty.

A theme cannot manufacture chemistry.

Fortunately, these two brought plenty of their own.

We could put them on the stairs.

Against the brick.

Near a doorway.

Upstairs.

Downstairs.

Outside beneath the marquee.

It didn't really matter.

They kept giving the photographs the same thing:

them.

And underneath all of the vintage styling and color, that's still what Black Rider Studios is looking for.

I don't want a 1970s wedding with two mannequins standing inside it.

I want two people obviously in love who just happen to look like they borrowed a time machine.

Much better.

There is a strange moment artists occasionally encounter when experimentation works a little too well.

You're supposed to test something.

Learn from it.

Put it back in the drawer.

Instead I found myself looking at the results thinking:

Well, damn.

Now what?

Because I liked our established edit.

But I liked this too.

It still felt like Black Rider Studios.

The shadows were still ours.

The mood was still there.

The dreaminess.

The romance.

The darkness.

But now there was this warm, faded, slightly strange nostalgia running through it.

Not fake film for the sake of pretending something was shot on film.

More like a memory whose colors had been sitting in somebody's head for fifty years.

It made me second-guess where our style was going.

I didn't have an answer.

I still don't think photography needs one permanent answer.

What I did know was that I wanted to use this look again.

So the experiment stayed.

Around here, that version eventually got a name:

Groovy Keri.

Keri doesn't even know this yet.

But her wedding ended up leaving a little piece of itself behind at Black Rider Studios.

The thing that made Keri and Zachary's wedding really work wasn't the color treatment.

It wasn't the clothes.

It wasn't even the building.

It was the atmosphere.

The whole wedding felt relaxed.

Chill.

Fun.

Less like a giant wedding production and more like someone had invited a bunch of interesting people to a really good, really fancy party sometime in the 1970s.

Great music.

Great food.

Great people.

Nobody seemed like they were waiting for the next scheduled wedding activity so they could check it off the list.

People socialized.

Talked.

Laughed.

Hung around.

Drank.

Danced.

Keri and Zachary floated through all of it together.

That's exactly the kind of environment where documentary photography becomes fun.

Because you stop hunting for wedding moments.

You just start watching people.

Someone laughs across the room.

Somebody leans into a conversation.

The newlyweds disappear together for a second.

A guest does something ridiculous on the dance floor.

Light hits somebody strangely.

Click.

Click.

Click.

The story starts assembling itself.

Not about what happened.

Never that.

About when it happened.

That was my goal once I understood Keri's vision.

I wanted them to look through these photographs years from now and experience just a tiny moment of confusion.

Wait.

Was this 2025?

Are we sure?

Because if we're going to commit to an era, I don't want to stop halfway.

The marquee already looked like a movie premiere:

HAPPILY EVER AFTER

STARRING KERI & ZACHARY

NOW PLAYING

Come on.

At that point, the building was practically writing the blog for me.

So we leaned into it.

The grain.

The warmth.

The strange greens.

The deep shadows.

The amber skin tones.

The flash.

The black and white.

The moments that looked less like modern wedding photography and more like someone found a box of prints in their parents' closet.

But the important part is that I never wanted the effect to swallow the photographs.

The edit was supposed to support Keri's world.

Not become the reason the photographs existed.

That's probably the biggest thing this wedding taught me.

Having a photography style doesn't mean doing the exact same thing forever.

That's not style.

Eventually that's just a formula.

And I don't want Black Rider Studios becoming a factory where every wedding goes in one side and comes out looking identical on the other.

At the same time, I don't want somebody bringing me twenty photographs from another photographer and saying:

Make ours look exactly like this.

That's not why you hire us either.

Keri found the middle.

She hired us because she loved our work.

Then she said:

What if we take this somewhere else?

That I can work with.

Give me your idea.

Give me your decade.

Your culture.

Your weird venue.

Your strange inspiration.

Your favorite movie.

Your music.

Whatever the hell you're building your wedding around.

We'll listen.

We'll experiment.

We'll bend.

But underneath it, the foundation stays:

ethereal, moody, dark, dreamy, romantic.

It still has to feel like us.

And more importantly, it still has to feel like you.

When I sent Keri the previews, she wrote:

“These are so beautiful! Thank you!”

Simple.

Perfect.

Because she had trusted us with something slightly unusual.

Not just her wedding.

Her vision of her wedding.

There's a difference.

Anybody can document what happened.

The harder job is understanding what somebody wanted it to feel like.

And when I looked at those previews, I finally understood what we'd made together.

Not a Black Rider Studios wedding with a 70s filter thrown over it.

Not a themed shoot.

A Keri and Zachary wedding.

That's what it needed to be.

Years from now, I hope Keri and Zachary remember the chemistry we had together.

Not just their chemistry as a couple.

The chemistry between all of us while making these photographs.

Because the experience matters.

Photography isn't simply hiring somebody who owns expensive cameras and collecting JPEGs a few weeks later.

You're spending one of the most emotionally loaded days of your life with these people.

You're trusting their judgment.

Their timing.

Their taste.

You're letting them into very private moments.

And occasionally, you're handing them a strange idea involving the 1970s and hoping they understand what you're talking about.

Keri did that.

We listened.

She trusted us.

We experimented.

And somewhere in the middle, her idea became part of our own creative history.

That's pretty damn cool.

I hope they remember the music.

The people.

The food.

The atmosphere.

How inseparable they were.

How much fun everybody was having.

And when they eventually pull these photographs out years from now, I hope there's still a tiny moment when they stop and think:

Wait...did we actually get married in the 70s?

If that happens?

We did our job.

A wedding should reflect the people actually getting married—not whatever the industry has decided a wedding is supposed to look like this year.

In Diana & Alejandro's Mexican wedding, their culture shaped everything from Alejandro's custom charro suit to the music and traditions of the reception. Different visual language, same philosophy: photograph the identity of the celebration instead of sanding it away.

You can also explore Claudia & Michael's Morgan Hill wedding, where Black Rider Studios' moody, cinematic foundation takes a more timeless and refined direction through vineyard portraits and emotional wedding storytelling.

One wedding leaned into culture.

One leaned toward timeless romance.

Keri and Zachary handed us the 1970s.

That's the fun of this job.

Black Rider Studios photographs weddings with a foundation rooted in mood, romance, atmosphere, and emotional storytelling. That's the foundation of the work you'll see throughout our wedding photography.

But your wedding shouldn't be forced into our personality at the expense of yours.

If you've built something distinctive, we want to understand it.

Sometimes the result will fit naturally inside what we already do.

Sometimes somebody like Keri comes along and makes us discover something we didn't know we wanted.

Both are worth chasing.

Some clients hire you because they already know exactly what you do.

The really interesting ones occasionally make you discover what else you could do.

Thanks for that one, Keri.

Groovy Keri lives on.