I’ve always loved fall—the beautiful leaves, the rainy days, fires in the fireplace, and lots of coffee to warm up chilly mornings. I also love fall because for all of childhood it meant new beginnings—fresh notebooks, new classes, exploration and discovery. It seems only fitting that just days from now Jesse and I will be saying our “I do’s” as the colors change and the days turn cool. With the wedding so close, and all of the last minute details being tidied up for our walk down the aisle, we’ve also started a new semester of our graduate programs, and we've had plenty to keep us busy as we plan! I’ve been meaning to share some thoughts about my experience on the other side of the camera over the course of our engagement—so to hear how a wedding photographer tackles the wedding planning (after photographing 119 weddings!), read on :)
Remembering the why: With an ever-expanding guest list, and a never-ending to-do list, I’ve found that the thing that keeps me the most grounded is remembering why we’re having a wedding in the first place.
For us, it’s not about the dress or the shoes or the color palate—it’s about sharing our love with family and friends and planning to spend the rest of our lives together. With that in mind, everything else seems less important—we’re not having matching bridesmaid dresses (I told my girlfriends and sisters what colors we were decorating with and told them to wear what made them feel beautiful!), we’re growing rosemary and arranging our own flowers, and rather than focusing on formality and traditions we don’t connect with, we’re making the day our own with an emphasis on spending meaningful time with the ones we love!
Ultimately, our wedding day is less for us and more for our loved ones, and so we’re trying to include them in the planning—asking opinions and advice, letting parents and siblings help, and truly celebrating together. It’s made the process much more fun than shouldering things alone.
Our ceremony: Going along with “remembering the why”, the ceremony for us is truly one of the parts of our wedding day we’re most excited for. We’ve spent so much time thinking about readings and our vows—what we want to promise each other and how we want to involve our family and friends. For us, marriage isn’t just about us making a commitment to each other—we believe in the importance of family and community and have invited people from our lives that we feel have truly supported and loved us as individuals throughout the years, and who will now love us and support us through our marriage too. We picked readings that we feel reflect how we view marriage and our commitment to each other (…keeping them secret now, but I’ll be sure to share later!), and we’re writing our own vows. *cue the waterworks and happy tears* ;)
Prioritizing memory making: It probably goes without saying but photography was so important to us as we thought about planning. We traveled down to North Carolina last summer for engagement photos, and are so excited to incorporate image-making into our wedding day! At the same time, we’re determined not to get caught up in the photo process, and have hired our friend Megan to share the day with us. Trusting her completely to capture the day as it unfolds, we know we’ll be able to leave the documenting to her and we’ll be free to make our own memories with our family and friends! We’re also planning to stick to what a close family friend referred to as “the buddy system” so we can share as much of the day together as we can—and our wedding day memories don’t end up being of us on opposite ends of the reception all night long!
"Us time": As graduate students, and with a jam packed travel and works schedule these past few months, Jesse and I have been so careful to carve out time for each other—from hours on a road trip searching for ceremony readings, long hikes in the woods where we talked about vows, a romantic weekend away to reconnect, and a handful of date nights without any wedding talk at all so we can just enjoy being together without a list of unfinished tasks—and it’s amazing how those few hours help to center us as we prepare for our wedding day! It would be so easy to get swept up in the business of every day life with our ridiculous schedules, and just look at the wedding planning as a list of items to check off—but instead we’ve approached it as an adventure and an experience we want to share! We’re both pretty chatty, and work through most things by “talking it out” and so it’s fun for us to hash and rehash options for the wedding. Knowing too that we’ve taken so much time beforehand to really consider options leading up to the day and making sure we’re being intentional about our decisions has left us confident that we’re planning a day that will make both us and our families happy!
In the end, however our final plans come together, we know that the day will be full of memories we'll cherish in the years to come--from good food, lots of love, and most of all, family and friends there to share our joy with us! Rain or shine, whatever obstacles we may encounter, I'm so excited for all of the adventures that lie ahead, and the wonderful man I'll be able to share them with. Just 12 more days to go!
