Seattle Photographer Daniel Sheehan
Indian Wedding at The Golf Club at Newcastle
Since 1997 I have been professionally photographing weddings and have been to hundreds of weddings. American weddings are great to photograph and I have seen them evolve over the years as people see fit to define how they want to arrange their wedding. Some strictly follow tradition and many feel free to improvise. There is something very special about traditional Indian weddings. No other culture has such elaborate rituals and ceremonies lasting days and such festive garments all of which make photographing them a radical departure from American weddings. I had the pleasure to photograph the wedding of Namita Singh and Gauhar Junnarkar at The Golf Club at Newcastle. Their wedding was a traditional Indian Hindu wedding with three days of festivities starting on Thursday with the Mehndi ceremony, one of the most important pre-wedding rituals especially for the bride. It was a fun and festive ritual, at Namita’s home with family and friends with the women wearing vivid colors. There was a a professional henna artist applying the mehndi to Namita and some of the other women as well. The designs are fascinating and the really good henna artists hide the name of the groom in the intricacies of the design.
Friday night the celebration of Namita and Gauhar’s wedding continued at the Bainbridge Island Community Center with more dancing and feasting.
Finally on Saturday, October 8th they had a Hindu wedding ceremony at The Golf Club at Newcastle. The weather was splendid and the light was grand. The Golf Club has a great white tent where the wedding ceremony took place and it was amazingly decorated with numerous flowers.
Before people began to arrive, Namita and Gauhar and I went around the grounds and made some pictures with the beautiful scenery in the background. The views from Newcastle are wonderful if the weather is clear and it was slightly hazy, but still very nice that day. In the traditional Indian manner, Gauhar mounted a horse ( if an elephant is not available) and with members of his family traveled around the grounds of Newcastle accompanied by music and drumming and dancing. They finally arrived at the entrance of the Clubhouse and were formally greeted by Namita’s family. Then they all proceed to enter the tent for the ceremony. Gauhar and the priests Mr Dilip Bhatt and Pandit Mahesh Shastriji entered along with almost everyone except the bride. The Hindu ceremony was performed according to Vedic traditions in the Sanskrit language. It was a relatively long ceremony made up of 16 different rituals. After the Hindu ceremony there was a cocktail hour on the terrace and then a formal dinner inside the main ballroom.
Here are some of the highlights of their wedding festivities beginning with the Mehndi and on through the end of the festivities on Saturday night.
Here is a link to Namita and Gauhar’s previous post of their The Golf Club at Newcastle Wedding. I would like to give a shout out to videographer Aaron Horton of Aaron Horton Productions who was a pleasure to work with. A real professional to work with. Would like to see his film with it is done. Finally hats offf to Erik Franklin and his staff at The Golf Club at Newcastle. They operate a really first class venue. One of the finest.