Posts from the ‘Encore: Day After’ Category

Upper Peninsula, Michigan

Just one from our Encore session with Kylee and Chris the day after their wedding in the Upper Peninsula, Iron River, Michigan. We fell in love with the fire-colored forests and sapphire lakes (and I tried to talk Nate into building a cabin up here). It has been an amazing weekend filled with food, unimaginably beautiful countryside, and the friendliest family members we’ve ever met. We’re a bit sad to say goodbye to this magical land where leaves change colors every day, lakes stretch farther than the horizon, and apples grow on trees. ;)

Gainesville, Florida

With some people, you just instantly click. Travis and Kristin got married on New Year’s Eve of last year and we helped ring in 2010 with them as they started a new year as husband and wife. We felt an instant friendship with them after meeting them and they must have too because they were sweet enough to bring us gifts of a feathered headband and hot sauce the next time they saw us. (How thoughtful are they?!) So we were so excited to meet back up with them in the town of Gainesville where their relationship started to shoot an Encore session at all of their favorite local spots. They took us all around town to various places that held special significance for them in their relationship from the apartment complex where they first met to the restaurant where they’d cuddle in the corner booth, to the eclectic junk-shop-turned-pizza-parlor with the best pies in town. By the end we felt like we’d gotten an in depth history lesson on Mr. and Mrs. Gerke. :)

I really LOVE getting to see our couples again, post-vows. I feel like, for so many wedding professionals, it’s always about the wedding. And I get it, there’s a lot going on and a lot of planning and a lot of excitement. But for me, as an avid people watcher and lover or digging deeper into my friends’ souls, I adore the chance to see them again after all the hoopla is over. I like seeing them just living it all out. Life. Marriage. Dogs. Moves. School. Jobs. Boring every day life. It’s fun to see their marriage and their new relationship and how their level of comfortability with each other only grows. Maybe we should start offering complimentary 5 year anniversary sessions, just so I can see everyone again. ;)

We had a FANTASTIC time and we can’t wait to see them again next month to shoot them AGAIN in New York City where we are going to trash Kristin’s wedding dress. I’ve heard rumors that tattoos and fountains might be involved! Who’s excited? I’m excited. I’m also excited about these photos. I’ve been using a new editing technique that I’m kind of head over heels for. I love them all…

HAHA. Gotcha.

This is so 1970′s. I just love it.

This crazy contraption was a HUGE art installation/fountain made out of salvaged junk and bits of all kinds. Fantastic!

Not many people could pull off a wall of hubcaps. Just sayin’…

Orlando, Florida

Maybe it’s their name, wildflowers. Maybe it’s the way they are almost always unexpected. Maybe it’s the mystery: how did they all get here? Maybe it’s the way they cover fields with reckless abandon. Maybe it’s the knowledge that they are only temporary. I’m not sure exactly what it is that makes wildflowers so lovely to me. I wish I could scatter seeds all over every patch of grass I come across so that my life could be painted with them. But then, they wouldn’t really be wild would they? It’s kind of like the difference between a lioness at the zoo and her sister on the plains. They are both lovely, but there’s a quality about the sister: Her wildness.

I wish I could say I was wild. I’m not. I’m fairly tame. I’m pretty domesticated. But I do have wild thoughts and dreams and every now and then I’ll surprise everyone with my reckless abandon. I’ll show up somewhere unexpected, even if only for a short time. So I do think that I’m a bit like a wildflower. If there were a flower that I could be, that is. I’ve never been as popular as the rose, or as elegant as the peony. I’ve never been tall enough to be a tulip or exotic enough to be an orchid. Sometimes when I show up, I’m yellow. Sometimes I’m pink. And sometimes, like the blooms in the pictures below, I’m purple. I don’t like being boxed in to one color all the time, or to one area. So, it’s no surprise that when I heard a rumor that there were purple wildflowers taking over a well-known field in town I knew I had to shoot there soon before they were gone.

And shoot there we did…

Today I’ll switch it up and start with my favorite: