A Mediterranean Summer – France, Switzerland, Greece & Croatia

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Hi there! Welcome to the Magdalena Studios blog, a journal about our weddings, sessions, travel, resources & more. We're happy to have you here. Stay a while and say hello!

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It all started with Coline and Matthieu’s wedding on Corsica (a small island of the South of France)- the most beautiful destination wedding! We photographed a few events surrounding the wedding, ending with a brunch party on a private beach. Corsica is a really cool little French island with a ton of Italian influence. We loved exploring the port town of Bastia and became slightly obsessed with the fresh local fish. We also were able to see a few other little towns around the island like Nonza beach and Saint Floran. Before we left, Scott asked me to marry him 🙂 We both loved it that much that he knew he wanted to do it there. Overall we rated Corsica a 10 out of 10!

Following the wedding festivities & our own little celebration, we headed to the mainland of France where we met up with our friends Sage and Noelle (our coolest friends! – Noelle is a pilot & Sage is a professional snowboarder/ gold medalist). We connected in Marseille and stayed there for a night, and we decided to get out of there as quickly as we could… We were not fans of Marseille at all! To be honest, it was dirty, overrun, and touristy… and gelato was too hard to find! Game changer. Lol. We actually changed our original plans to explore the coast of France (Nice, Monaco, & Cannes) when we found out that Nice would be similar and decided to stay on a track up in the countryside instead, and we were so glad we did. 

We rented a car & traveled North into the mainland of France (Grignan to be exact) to meet up with our friends Lauren & Tim Fair for their workshop with Julie Paisley. Lauren had asked us to model for their workshop, where about 20 other photographers from all over the US and world were attending to refine their skills & businesses! (Such an amazing workshop!) The timing was perfect and we are so lucky to have some pretty epic engagement photos from this stop. It still feels surreal. Grignan is such a cool little town with a ton of culture and local feels. Surrounding the town are lavender fields and greenery – it was total countryside picturesque bliss. 

We solidified our plan to head even further North to Lake Annecy, France where Sage had a friend with a house on the lake. We had a few car troubles along the way (haha) but we made it! And boy was it worth it. I am so glad we ended up changing our plans. Eissoaum and his beautiful family live a storybook life with a house on the lake, a big grassy yard, their own private beach & a boat to explore the teal blue waters and rope swings on the lake. We spent a few days hanging with them, swimming, paddle boarding, out on the boat, and exploring Annecy.

We really didn’t want to go back to the South of France. The food, the smells, and the people were all getting a bit nicer the further North we went… so we decided to change our outbound flights to the next location to leave from Geneva, booked an AirBnB, and took a beautiful  two hour drive through the Swiss Alps. 

We arrived in Geneva around sunset time and had no idea what we were about to walk into. There was no parking & the streets were blocked so the boys dropped Noelle and I off to unpack. We found out it was the last day of Geneva Festival – a huge annual 10 day summer event. When we walked outside to explore that night, everyone was lined up on the lake to watch the firework display – and it was truly like nothing I have ever seen. The next day there were some lingering events like an air show & carnival rides and vendors so we explored the lakeside and rest of the city. Everything was super clean, albeit expensive, but really charming. We are dying to go back to Switzerland to see more of it now!

We packed up less than 48 hours later to head to Santorini, Greece. 

Scott and I finished our European summer off with a final week in Split, Croatia and a night in Paris before we headed home to the US!

Check out some of the photos below
& if you want to read about our engagement story, click here!

 

  1. Michael says:

    Hey, my name is Michael! Big fan of your photography on Instagram. I was wondering what camera you use when you travel. Do you carry your dslr or do you recommend getting something smaller? Hope to hear from you. Thanks!

    • Thank you Michael! I carry my Canon 5D Mark 3 when I travel and my Contax645 for film 🙂 I usually just print one lens though, but with this trip we had all of our gear because we were photographing a wedding in France!

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