It’s a story I usually recite to each of our couples, because inevitably they ask, “So how did you get into wedding photography?”

How did we get into wedding photography. . . .

To summarize, it went something like this: Wanting to be a writer, I headed to college to study English and Creative Writing. My journalism professor introduced me to an editor at the local newspaper, who took me on as a freelance correspondent. Gradually, he started asking me to shoot my own photos at the events I covered, rather than having him send a separate photographer at the same time. And gradually, I realized that, although I knew next to nothing about photography at that point, I was enjoying it as much or more than the writing itself. As some shakeups happened at the newspaper and my editor got moved to another section, I realized the future I had with the paper wasn’t one that would make me happy. So I dove into learning everything I could about being a wedding and portrait photographer, and Danny joined me. We were determined to make a career out of helping people have fun as they make beautiful, lifelong memories.

Suffice it to say, that plan worked. We’re wedding photographers, and we love it.But why? Why, out of everything we could be doing with our lives, are we photographing couples’ weddings?

Because we love witnessing the very beginning of couples’ marriages.

Because we love all the excitement and happiness of a wedding day.

Because we love being a part of something much bigger than ourselves, and something bigger than even the couples we photograph.

When we document a couple’s wedding, we’re providing a beautiful and authentic record of their family history for their children and their children’s children. It’s something lasting. Their photographs will be just as valuable — maybe more valuable — to the couple in fifty years, when they turn the pages of their album with wrinkled hands, still wearing the rings they exchanged in those pictures. Later, after the couple has passed away, their photographs will have an even greater value to the relatives who survive them, and who can remember them through those pictures in the very moments they were happiest, and introduce them, in a way, to children who weren’t even born while the couple was alive.

What we do has so much more value than simply getting a few snapshots. We want to help our couples cultivate their family history as it begins, so it will live on after their own lives end.

Even as I was writing for the newspaper, that was something that tugged at me incessantly — something I felt was entirely missing from my work. There, what I produced had a very short shelf life; in twenty years, the fact that they were featured in the newspaper probably won’t matter at all to the people I interviewed and photographed.

I think few people would argue with my claim that we all want to spend our lives doing work that matters, producing something of lasting value. We’ve found something last that we love. I couldn’t ask for anything more.

~ Laura