“What are your wedding packages?” “How much do you charge?” “Do you have our date available?” “Do you charge for travel?” As wedding photographers, we are blessed to get these kinds of questions quite often, in fact I would say they are the most prevalent, but recently someone asked us a question I had never really had to answer. After we gave a 10 minute answer, I’m sure they probably regretted asking (lol) but it wasn’t something we could simply answer in a sentence or two. That question was “What inspires you?” and I thought this would be a cool opportunity to share a little bit about what does inspire us!
It’s a valid question and one that got us excited when we started digging deeper to explain it all. For us it’s almost automatic intangibles that we carry with us into every wedding and every couple we work with. Like many professional photographers that decide to make the jump into actually making a career out of this field, we started off shooting whatever we could, whenever we could. I think everyone likes pretty pictures and who wouldn’t love the opportunity to take one right? I mean just look at the market today, entry level DSLRs are everywhere and more affordable than ever, and you simply can’t walk 10 feet in public anymore without people snapping cell phone shots of something for social media. So I guess it’s safe to say that cool feeling/desire to take a pretty picture lives within us as professional photographers just as much as it does in the teenager down the street who loves to IG and tweet daily. But also for us personally it goes so much deeper than that. After a few years of getting our feet wet with everything from volunteer events for non-profits to newborn portraits, we finally found our calling working with couples just like us for their weddings and engagements. This is what inspires us!
Connection
We love the unique connection that exists between every couple we work with! We pick up on these subtle little details in the way they move with each other. Body language can tell you so much about communication between two individuals and being able to recognize some of these little intricacies is so key in how we engage the couples we work with not only with us but each other! Often times we will see something in the way they move or look at each other and it’s so genuine and pure as a part of who they are, they don’t even know they do it until we capture that singular moment of connection and reveal it to them through the art of photography! We also love connecting with our clients as many of them we become friends with and spend quality time with long after the wedding dress has been tucked away and wedding cake is completely gone. Being able to grow a friendship with those we serve has been one of the if not the most rewarding and meaningful aspects of what we do!
The Rush
Some people like to ride motorcycles fast, other like to sky dive, and many love to seek their thrills on rollercoasters. That same rush you get when you do whatever it is you love to do, is the same rush we get during a wedding day! Though we probably don’t look as anxious or green now as we used to when we first started, we still get butterflies before every wedding! There’s just something so beautiful and exhilarating at the same time about the entire story to be told at a wedding day! At any moment, literally anything can happen. A bride’s father could lose it and shed a tear while all eyes are on her at the altar. The groom could break out into a breakdance during the middle of the first dance! All the groomsmen could strip down to just their pants and ties to give the bride a lap dance she’ll never forget to the sound of “Raining men” playing in the background (we’ve literally seen all of these things!). With the experience of all the different couples we’ve worked with at countless weddings over the years, you learn to be ready and to anticipate, but at the end of the day it’s exciting not always knowing exactly what will happen or how. Being bestowed with the responsibility of capturing those moments always gives us an adrenaline rush!
Emotions & Memories
I wrote these both together because to us they go hand in hand. For me, emotions are one of my absolute favorite things to capture on camera! Be it a happy moment between a couple laughing, the look on a mother’s face when she holds her son tight for the first dance, or even the sometimes awkward in between emotions that we capture unexpectedly. With our style we tend to seek these moments because we know that if we can tie an emotion to an image, we can create a memory. You can look back on your engagement photos and love that beautiful flower garden you took your pictures in, or that mountain backdrop you saw in the distance, but when you see the genuine joy on your face from that little moment you shared with your partner, it will make you feel the exact thing you felt at that moment and that my friends is the closest thing to time travel that I know of! When we are honored with the privilege of documenting those memories, I will say it never gets old!
Perspective & Creation
For us, every new experience fosters new perspectives. There is a quote (which I’ll paraphrase) that I read a long time ago about what you get when you hire a professional photographer: “When you hire a photographer you are not just hiring a simple person who snaps photos. You’re hiring a complex emotional being who brings with them to every shoot, every book they’ve read, every site they’ve seen, every song they’ve heard, every emotion they’ve felt, every image they’ve viewed, every experience they’ve had and every inspiration they’ve drawn in order to channel just a piece of that to create something beautiful for you.” -Anonymous I honestly wish I remember where I read that but the impact it had was profound and it has stuck with me ever since. Being able to put a piece of ourselves into every creation we make and telling the story of two souls through our unique perspective is something at the end of the day that inspires us from the start and keeps us going when we feel sick or tired. Through perspective you can turn messy chaos into a beautifully intimate setting. Having spent so much time behind the camera, especially the last two years, it has really taught us to look at the world differently. It teaches you not only to look at the obvious but to find the beauty that lies in the things around you that to the naked eye, may not be so beautiful. But with a little strategic adjustment to a camera setting and a little help from lightroom or photoshop, suddenly you’ve taken an ordinary moment through the art of perspective and created something beautiful. Creation!
As we continue on this incredible path that God has put in front of us, we are grateful when we look at the past and all it has taught us. We are excited about the future and all the possibilities! Lastly, we continue to try and be ever present in the moment enjoying the little moments in life right now, and sharing our gift with the world!
Thank you all as always for following along and we hope this has been a cool look at what inspires us! Just remember, especially if you are reading this, you are likely a big part of our creative inspiration and continued growth and for that, we are forever thankful!
-Joe & Jenny