Candid, documentary-style coverage plus fun, guided portraits. Wedding photographers in Snohomish, WA
Candid, documentary-style coverage plus fun, guided portraits. Wedding photographers in Snohomish, WA
That is a sentence I have said out loud exactly once, to someone who asked the right question at the right moment.Â
I am saying it now because it is the truest thing I can tell you about who we are and how we got here.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let me start at the beginning.
Weddings were in my veins before I ever picked up a camera.
My mom was a florist. My dad was a musician who played receptions. I grew up classically trained – Seattle Girls Choir, a travelling choir after that, state solo awards, four years as a wedding singer, a stint singing the National Anthem at every single sporting event my high school had, and then a year doing the same for a local baseball team. I worked as a karaoke jockey in Montana the way my dad did in Oregon. I have been offered record deals in bars. I have never once paid for a drink on karaoke night. I also had a brief stint in opera that my classically trained voice teachers were significantly more excited about than I was (but it’s a fun party trick).Â
And I also spent a fair amount of time behind a sound board and hiring DJ (that karaoke jockey stint)
Weddings were everywhere I looked. And yet when it came time to photograph them, I wanted nothing to do with it.
Film photography in the late 90s - the absolute necessity of choosing which specific moments get to live on that precious roll - did not vibe with me at all. I went to school for coordination instead.
I worked in events. Became a marketing VP. Eventually landed at a small boutique portrait studio that closed without warning, leaving me jobless. I am also epileptic, as is my daughter Braelyn, which meant we could not be more than five minutes from EMT response at any given time. I had to do something that worked around that. I decided I would photograph seniors and families.
Josh wanted to do weddings. I still had film PTSD.
Absolutely not.
So Josh made a plan behind my back.
He and a friend of mine from Nebraska coordinated without telling me. She flew out to photograph a wedding in Oregon and needed a second photographer. I had been volunteered as tribute. I went begrudgingly. I was not happy about it.
Five minutes in, I knew.
This was my calling. This lit my whole soul on fire in a way nothing else ever had. Something switched on in my soul and it has not switched off since. We were somewhere with no cell service and I could not even call Josh to tell him. I found out what I was supposed to do with my life and I could not reach the one person I needed to tell.
I also got hit in the face with my friend’s lens hard enough to give me a black eye. The story ended up in PPA magazine. I did not even care.
I went home and revamped our entire online presence. Shot every styled shoot I could book. Second shot for every photographer who would have me. The following year we had 29 weddings of our own. The year after that, 60. The rest is history.
One more thing you should probably know about us before we get any further.
Josh and I met because my brother was married to his sister. They threw a Halloween party. My whole family came. Fast forward a few months and a friend request and a LOT of Skype calls that were just us typing and staring at each other …Josh and I caught fire.
Our siblings did not make it. We did. We got married at his dad’s house – the same place we met – and we have four nephews who are related to us on both sides, which sounds complicated until you realize it just means we love them twice as much. And no, before you ask, it is not weird like THAT. We are not related. We just both ended up related to the same four boys through completely different family lines, which is either a beautiful coincidence or the universe being extremely efficient.
Josh knew before I did. He has been doing that ever since.