Like Alanis Morissette said, it’s a little bit ironic (don’t cha think?) that as professional wedding photographers who photograph love for a living, we photograph the people we love the most, the ones who showed us how to love, the ones by whose love we’re even here in the first place, the least. It’s like the mechanic whose wife’s car is broken down or the orthodontist whose children have crooked teeth! It’s ironic, we think, but almost regardless of your profession, all too true. Oftentimes, the ones closest to us often have to wait in line when they should be first. That’s kind of a metaphor for life if we’re not careful, too, isn’t it? The people who love us the most are also the most patient and understand.
Since we’ve been off the road and home this summer, and because of a death in our family this spring that shook us up and is still producing aftershocks, we committed to creating more margin in our life so we could fill it with our families, who haven’t gotten as much of us as any of us would’ve liked these past few years. (They haven’t gotten grandchildren yet, either! But you can’t have everything you want in life all at once, right, Mom and Dad?!)
Anyways, when Amy’s mom asked us for an updated family photo this summer before wedding season kicked off for us, we jumped at the chance, but decided to add a twist: an impromptu anniversary mini-session! We’ve written before about our hearts for our photography. We feel privileged to have the honor of preserving a young couple’s love in its raw, pure, joyous, unfiltered, emotional state for generations to come, so that fifty years from now, when our clients are grandparents and their granddaughter gets engaged, they’d be able to open their wedding album and, one page at a time, that 20-something would be able to witness the real, fresh, vibrant emotion come back to life and jump right off the page, that she’d know by feeling not just by seeing, how much her grandpa truly loved her grandma, because we believe that a legacy of love, love passed from one family member to the next, has the power to transform marriages and, therefore, entire family trees. And you know what? It was beyond special for us to capture that time in between bride and grandma. To celebrate 34 years of marriage and all of the blessings that have come from it.
Between all four sets of our grandparents and both sets of parents, we inherited a legacy of love and a mantle of marriage over 250 years long, and it’s never lost on us that we’ve got what we’ve got because of what was given to us. With that in mind, today, we’re celebrating Amy’s mom and dad, Kim and Kevin, who look as lovely and in love today as they did 35 years ago when he showed her a ring… and she said yes.
How sweet are they?! If you’re a photographer who’s felt “too busy” (like we did!) to photograph your most cherished loved ones, we hope this encourages you to carve out the time to make it happen! We will treasure these photos for the rest of our lives.
