Through these images, I hope you feel the emotion I try to capture on your wedding day. The portraits are the eye candy of the day: so easy, so fun, and always everyone's favorites! Through these images, I hope you see the feeling I try to capture in the little moments throughout the day. The photos that you come back to, after the "money shot"'s been viewed, that just make your heart swell with the emotions that filled your body on your wedding day!
I can talk + talk + blabber on about how important the lasting memories are, blah blah blah, of the work I do. Instead, I decided to make my couples explain what it is that they come away with, after working with me.
Enjoy seeing a few of my couple's selected favorites from their actual wedding days, and then read about WHY they chose them as their favorites, or what they feel as they view them over and over again.
My only hope is that these memories grow stronger with each viewing, and are passed from the couples to their children, and on and on. That someday these smiles are heirlooms of a family - so deep and meaningful - and looked and over and over again, so everyone who views them knows their importance!
Rachel: I love this picture for so many reasons. The first is that a captured a moment in our wedding that we got together, just us in the middle of all the beautiful chaos that your wedding day has to offer. Secondly, it is a gorgeous picture that captures our love, our wedding venue (the family farm), and the beauty of the day. What more could you ask for?
Amy: I loved so many moments captured from our wedding. What I love about this picture is the beauty between us and around us. That in the middle of the party we were able to step away, laugh, kiss and bask in each others company before the night got away. I love the sun setting behind us andhow it makes the moment glow with love.
This photo is beautiful to us in more ways than room to type! It was taken as we walked around my parents' house in the brief moments after the ceremony ended, before we started the greeting line for our relatives. From the crazy lush foliage (our family weeded, scrubbed, trimmed and planted for days and days, sometimes in the rain, up to the very hour the guests arrived - thank you all!) to the careful simplicity of our fashion (one of my sisters hand-made my dress and Drew meticulously picked out every last element of his getup, down to his cuff links and socks), the image reflects everything we were going for that day. We love the privately cheerful smiles on our faces, which are perhaps the true winning aspects of the shot; considering we had literally just finished saying very important things to each other in front of a hundred people, neither of us looks like we want to be anywhere else! The photo truly shows us as we are together in everyday life, but dressed up and beaming about the special day.
I considered myself to be a low-stress bride, but between road closures for the Pride parade and a torrential downpour on the morning of the wedding, I was a little more anxious than I thought I would be. One of our very favorite pictures is from our first look. As soon as we got to see each other, the anxiety was gone. It was no longer each of us as individuals trying to navigate the day. We were together again. We were a team. Everything was lighter. Everything was better together. We love this photo for the way that it so beautifully and authentically captures those feelings.
William and I are are a silly, goofy, sarcastic, completely not-serious-unless-we-need-to-be sort of couple. So many moments on our wedding day were absolutely just... us: the men lost their ties and had to buy new, my sister Michela and I showed up at the venue while William + friends were still unloading in the parking lot so we drove circles around them in full hair and makeup, William wore a black undershirt instead of white and had to borrow, and certainly no one will ever forget that last five minutes before the ceremony in which Michela introduced the pink lip gloss and my left boob and they instantly became best friends.
My recollection of the day was that it happened in slow motion and in fast forward all in one wave. We shared so many tears, hugs, laughs, blessings, and high-fives with the absolutely most important people in our lives. We were so overwhelmed with love in those moments that I was certain all of the love that could possibly exist in the entire universe was all right there with us. I feel this way still - in wonder that we found each other and thankful that I'm able to feel something that doesn't have a description, a feeling beyond what I ever thought love could be.
Both photos really capture the the spirit of the day and remind us whatever is swirling around us in the universe, whether it be wonderful or challenging, we have each other to see it through.
We have so many favorites, but I always come back to this one as it seems to encapsulate what our wedding day meant to us. After a lot of deliberation and late-game changes, we decided to stay true to ourselves and get married at home amongst our closest friends and family, and when I look at this photo, I can so clearly remember why. Here we were having a moment of celebration, surrounded by the familiar clutter of our lives together, from the sock monkey wine-holder Ryan gave me on our first Christmas together to the Japanese solar-powered tail-wagging cat we bought wandering the streets of San Francisco. Minutes earlier we were pledging our vows to each other in our backyard, and moments earlier we were toasting our loved ones in our living room. And I just remember how happy we were in this particular moment together, living something we'd lived hundreds of times before but now as husband and wife. Small, love-filled moments of our day like these are exactly what we most want to remember, and what we're so thankful to have photos to remind us of.