Posts in Wedding Photography
January 3, 2020 Traditional Wedding in Charlotte, NC

Bethany and Raul, their friends and family, and my photography team got to start the new decade in the best way possible: with an outpouring of love and faith. The love part is obvious, but seeing Bethany and Raul’s faith manifest in more subtle ways was equally beautiful.

What’s more, as it was a rainy, chilly January day, they had to have a lot of faith in us to make sure that their photos were beautiful, while still enjoying the experience! Not always can you convince a bride to get her train wet (post-ceremony, of course!) so that she can have a few romantic outdoor photos in the rain, but Bethany was game for anything, trusting that we knew what we were doing and that we’d take good care of her gown. Luckily, she had her new husband to keep her warm, and then the two of them danced the night away within the excellent architecture of Waterfront Hall.

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September 28, 2019 Mountain Wedding in Downtown Asheville, NC

For the very last photos of their Charlotte engagement session, Laura and Chris (per Chris’s half joking idea) ran through a fountain. We finished our photoshoot all laughing; them completely drenched, Emmaleigh’s shoes and pants soaked through from holding a flash, me nicely dry but nonetheless ecstatic about our photos.

A few weeks later, Emmaleigh and I stood on the balcony of the penthouse suite of the Indigo Hotel watching an enormous rain cloud roll over West Asheville towards us, this time quite a bit less excited about the impending drenching.

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August 3, 2019 Magical Garden Wedding at Haiku I Do || Asheville, NC

Fal and Richard had quite the week leading up to their wedding: medical boards on Tuesday, moving on Wednesday and driving to Asheville on Thursday. So, come Saturday, it seemed almost surreal that they’d been able to pull everything off. As they were sitting on the floral sofa under the twinkle lights taking their couple’s photos, in the middle of gazing lovingly at each other Richard suddenly gasped and threw up his hands, “We really did it!”

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June 22, 2019 Fairytale Garden Wedding at Homewood || Asheville, NC

Not often do I get to say this, but I actually knew the groom before the bride did! Q and I both came to Asheville in 2011 as student athletes, and since my freshman roommates were all on the women’s soccer team, I befriended many on the men’s side as well. I photographed both Q’s soccer matches and his graduation photos, so when I got a text from an unknown number while I was working in NYC saying “Hey! Are you free June 22, 2019? Tara and I would love for you to shoot our wedding.” I was understandably thrilled! Well, first I had to figure out whose number it was, then I was thrilled.

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June 8, 2019 Wedding at The Laurel Room at High Vista || Asheville, NC

My absolute favorite thing about being a wedding photographer is getting to see families work together to make their bride and groom’s day the most special possible. For Lauren and Alex, while the weather wasn’t what we’d hoped and several plans had to change, we got to see just how loved and appreciated these two are by all their family and friends. Even better, the rain stopped just enough for us to run outside for photos against the perfectly misty mountains. It was such an honor getting to spend the day capturing the new Mr. and Mrs. Wall’s love for each other. 

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May 18, 2019 Mountainview Wedding at the Crest Center || Asheville, NC

Wedding days are often a great metaphor for life: you can plan for months or years to have that “perfect day,” but no matter how foolproof your strategy, things will never happen quite that way in real time. The beauty of wedding photography is that when things go off course (and timelines go out the window!) we’re there to document families, friends and our fantastic wedding industry colleagues working together to help make each couple’s day, as Emmaleigh says, “perfectly imperfect.”

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May 11, 2019 Garden Wedding at Ijams Nature Center | Knoxville, TN

Getting to go home, photograph a wedding for someone I’ve known through running for a decade, sing every verse of “Rocky Top” and capture the pure joy of two people and their families coming together to celebrate love, was everything I needed. A heartfelt thanks to everyone who came together amidst stressful circumstances to pull off an absolutely gorgeous wedding last weekend!

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Amber + Chris's Elopement at the St. Jude's Chapel of Hope in Asheville, NC

Susan Marlan of Beloved Ceremony officiated the simple ceremony, and because this was a “true elopement” I also got to serve as a witness. Just after the bride and groom exchanged rings, and just before their first kiss, Chris leaned forward and rested his forehead against Amber’s, where they simply stood breathing each other in for a few moments. It’s these moments, the quiet and intimate scenes, that impact me the most - both as a photographer capturing the emotions before me and a human who feels everything deeply.

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Parent Photo Albums || Nicole + Chris's Highland Brewing Company Wedding in Asheville, NC

I loved giving people gifts. I love even more getting to make said gifts. From age 5 onward, whenever I could, I handmade all family Christmas gifts, starting as early as June to ensure that everyone’s was completed on time.

So, to be able to incorporate gift giving into my business has been a real pleasure. My favorite product that I started offering last year was a parent album, a smaller version of each couple’s photo album showcasing almost exclusively the images that the couple, the parents and siblings are in. This way, each parent gets their own commemorative album tailored to them, highlighting the moments that they were a part of.

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Photo Album || Keya + Eric's Engagement + Elopement Weekend

My goal was to make the two separate photoshoots blend together into one cohesive story about their lovely weekend, although we only spend about 5 hours total with them. As we ended our engagement shoot (see the full post here) with the most beautiful summer sunset leaving our couple in awe, I decided to set the scene with this opening photo of our Blue Ridge Mountains bathed in color. Photos-wise, from there I moved forward chronologically, ending our first day’s image showing Keya and Eric walking into the distance, alluding to their walk towards their future as husband and wife.

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Wedding Photo Album || Katie + Mario's Raspberry Plain Manor Wedding

I love Katie and Mario’s approach to their album: while we had over 1,000 photos to choose from they managed to narrow it all the way down to 100 (an impressive feat!) so that they could have as many large full-spread images as possible. They wanted to keep it simple, to let the emotional photos to speak for themselves, so we kept the text to a minimum as well, only including one Bible verse layered perfectly over a silhouette I made during their ceremony. I certainly keep the album in mind while photographing each wedding (in fact, I specifically shoot with the flower & layout of each album in my head) but sometimes things work out even better than I’d planned. Being able to pair the quotation “this is a profound mystery” with a silhouette is one of those moments!

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Boho Chic Styled Elopement at Ridgeview Venue || Asheville, NC

One of the reasons I love participating in styled shoots is getting to see the amazing creativity that comes out of vendors directly working together to create a concept. For instance, not only did Emmaleigh help me to style the provided attire for detail shots, but she even brought in her own crystals and antiques to add character and depth to the photos!

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Sultry Black and Gold Styled Wedding || Asheville Social Hall

Melissa of Cakes by Gray reached out to me to photograph a new cake flavor for her - grapefruit and black pepper (it was delicious!) - as we decided that instead of simply sticking with the original in-studio photos that we’d first planned, we would also put together a little styled shoot. Why not, right? To coordinate with the sensual flavors, Melissa created this stunning black pastry masterpiece accented with gold and thus we had our theme. Design inspiration can come from anywhere, even the wedding cake. To round out our design team, Melissa brought in vendors all local to Asheville to help us create this moody styled elopement in the brand new Asheville Social Hall Space.

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Wedding Photo Album || Nicole + Chris's Highland Brewing Company Wedding

By far, my favorite part of creating Nicole and Chris’s heirloom album was interweaving each line of their vows throughout the book. Design-wise, adding text to a photo album presents its own challenges; namely, how to make it readable without distracting from the photos. I shoot each wedding with the album in mind, using compositional elements like leading lines or shallow depth of field to create negative space perfect for overlaying words. Typically, if I’m adding just a few verses or quotations in an album, I can choose which already-designed (by me, in a different program) pages to pair the text with based on the blurb’s shaping. With Nicole and Chris’s I needed to keep their vows in the order they wrote them, and somehow as I was creating the photo layouts for each page, the text seemingly just fit right in perfectly. A reflection of how easily Nicole and Chris work together as well, I think.

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Katie + Mario Fairytale Wedding at Raspberry Plain Manor || Leesburg, Virginia

The best part about photographing a wedding for your family is getting to be a part of all of the behind-the-scenes, intimate details of the day that most guests would only get to see in photos. The second best part is getting to see just how important capturing all of those little moments truly is, when you’re the one who will want to relive the memories decades later (especially of your grandparents tearing it up on the dance floor!)

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2019 Goals: Dream Big

After everything I learned last year (read more here), I realized that it’s the “helping others” part that I want to focus on most in the coming year(s). This is the first year that my goals will look quite different than they did in the past; traditionally mine have read something like: “more weddings”, “more family photoshoots”, etc. Not that there was anything wrong with that approach, I did need to augment my bookings for my business to be sustainable. However, its the experiences I’m creating through those photoshoots that I want to focus on most.

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2018 Reflection: The Building Year

I like to use the changing of the calendar year as a start- and end-point to evaluate my metrics and to reevaluate my goals. This is the first time that I ended the year with a very different sense of achievement than I began: I entered hoping to bolster my bookings and set my goals accordingly. But I ended having learned the true “why” behind my drive to do each of these types of photoshoots. In essence, my work has become not just about the end product (typically a storybook photo album) but the entire experience of the session, and by extension an enjoyment of life.

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November 24, 2018 Intimate Wedding at Clarklewis || Portland, OR

A couple weeks ago I got to live out one of my many dreams; I got to photography a wedding in Portland. The milestone was exciting, but it was my experience at the wedding that really reminded me why I began photographing weddings in the first place. Every single piece of this celebration - from the seating assignments using a photo of one or both of the brides with the assignee to the dozen toasts to the chorus of every guest singing the final ceremony song - was personal. The atmosphere of the entire day was one of thoughtfulness, of peace, of brilliant happiness (both for the couple and from them.)

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