I’ve been fascinated with photography since some time around the 3rd grade when my dad let me hold his black Nikon FE film camera and showed me how to take a picture. Shortly afterwards I got my sister’s hand-me-down hot pink Concord 110EF (Uff da. Let that baby burn your retinas for a moment) and began taking scores of blurry, out of focus images of hot wheels cars and our family dog.
This was not taken on a plastic, hot pink film camera.
But I never set out to be a wedding or family photographer. I ended up here, partly by chance, after a 15 year journey with photography. Don’t worry, I won’t rehash the whole journey now. I’ll save that for our engagement session. The longer you tolerate that story, the longer our session — it’s a win-win!
The thing is, this journey matters. Because the steps along the way taught me how to see, work, and think like a photographer.
My first teaching job (Monticello High School, thank you for your service) came with an asterisk: the job was mine as long as I agreed to do the yearbook. So I was handed the keys to room 211 and a Canon T3i and told to get after it.
That thread carried me all the way through my time teaching photography in St. Charles, Minnesota. We used the instagram handle @SaintsPublishing to document the sports, events, and day to day life of the school.
Over a semester-long course, students learned how to operate professional cameras, read the light, use advanced composition techniques, and post-process their photos. For me, getting to see photography through so many pairs of fresh eyes was an awesome and humbling reminder that creativity can’t be condensed into test-able content.
At this same time, I was blessed to be in that stage of life without kids or a mortgage. (I still can’t fathom how much free time I used to have. And how much I probably wasted comatose on my sofa watching The Office for the 17th time.) I poured myself into learning the ins and outs of landscape photography, which provided a nice contrast to the fast-moving and ever-changing environments of event and documentary photography.
I learned to pause, to breathe, to scan the elements within the framed. How nudging the camera a little one way or the other can completely change the power of a photograph.
And then I had a kid.
And now I am reminded time and time again that no landscape photograph, no matter how breathtaking, will ever compare to photographs that capture the joy and chaos of life itself.
Which brings me, finally, to your wedding day.
Years of experience in fast-paced sports and events, the patience and eye of a landscape photographer, and the awareness that these images will be some of most special of your life, the images we make on your wedding day will be stunning. I guarantee it.