the blog

I’m going to kick off saying that I’m really proud of myself. I’m not proud that I made beautiful set with a desk and a chair, but that I actually completed a project right before the start of our 2018 Fall wedding season. 

This time last year we broke ground on our new house. We thought we were crazy. We decided to sign our name to a house where Patrick’s parents live, take over the mortgage and claim a place that would be “home” to us for years to come. When we were designing what it would look like, inside and out, what color the living room and bathrooms would be, what fixtures would hang from the ceiling, I knew I wanted to really nice and inviting space. A place where family and friends are always welcome and strangers would walk through and feel a sense of belonging in a home away from home. But also a place to share where we’ve been and where we are going.

About a year ago, Patrick’s dad, Bunk, pulled a desk out of storage. It was a mess. It needed serious love. It has broken drawers and the middle one actually was broken and Patrick and Bunk decided to fix it. I always thought we should do something with it, I just didn’t know what. The desk belonged to Bunks Dad, Daddy D they called him. Patrick’s grandfather.

Then about a month ago, it came to me. I’ve lived overseas, I love to travel, and I’ve been to 9 nations. I got a fortune cookie in high school that said “Your Feet will cover the soil of many nations.” I totally believe it was prophetic and the Lord speaking something into my heart that I didn’t even know. 

So fast forward to last week. I was feeling down, stale, unmotivated. We are in the start of the fall wedding season with 18 weddings left before New Years and I didn’t want to go into it feeling the way I was, so I literally told Patrick, “I need to do something else creative.” I needed another outlet for this creative girl to get inspired, to find joy again, to renew passion and the things I loved. Then it hit me. Patrick was in the basement moving stuff around and I asked him to leave the desk out. I knew I wanted to fix it, restore this 60 year old family heirloom. Bunk gave it to us and gave me the freedom to do with it whatever I’d like. So I took it and ran. 

We are so excited to share this wedding for lots of reasons! First off, Amanda and Dillon have become really cool friends. Though we don’t see each other super often, Amanda and Maggie get to run into each other at pretty cool events like Cake and Whiskey, a women in business networking event.

Amanda is a Fashion Designer so you know her wedding was going to have lots of detail, personality and flare! Showing up at her parents house that day was so special for a lot of reasons. Upon entering the house, Amanda had her beautiful BHLDN dress on a bodice as she finalized her final touches on her dress. After a dress fiasco with a different boutique, Amanda finally finding her dream dress at BHLDN but she decided she was going to alter the dress herself. On the back of the dress she added a really cool element that almost looks like wings. We loved it! The details we had for styling their invitation and a really cool ring box were some of my favorites. Especially her parents coffee table. Wait until you see the colors and how awesome it worked with her their details.

It’s Friday and we are about to be sharing a handful of weddings from the past month. We have officially entered fall and winter wedding season. We have 17 weddings left between now and Christmas, which is only 14 weeks away!

Today on the blog we are sharing Tracy and Patricks August wedding. They had a beautiful ceremony at Loyola Chapel and a packed dance floor reception at Preston Hall. Tracy and Patrick just came to our home last Saturday night for their gallery reveal so we are pretty excited to share this just a couple days after they received their images!

It was such an honor to shoot Sarah and Jake’s wedding. Maggie and Patrick have known Sarah and her family for years through church! While they were off shooting another, I was spending the day on a beautiful winery, with a beautiful couple, and an ornery goat. 
Sarah and Jake have been long distance for so many years, both being military. They are still going to be long distance for the first few months of their marriage! I can’t imagine. But if anyone can handle it with grace, these two can. 

When we met Mike and Nicole for the first time, our first impression was… in Patrick’s words… they seem like their pretty cool people. I mean, Mike did propose to Nicole in Portovenere, Italy at sunset at the top of the Church of San Pietro overlooking the Ligurian Sea the after a full day of hiking and exploring the Cinque Terre. How amazing is that!? Nicole knew what she wanted, from florals, to design, and color palette. And ultimately she wanted Mike. They met through work, and figured out how to make it work when they no longer worked for the same company. After being together long enough to realize they loved time spent together and weren’t getting tired of each other, they knew they had to get married and be together!

They met on a Friday night at the bar where John works, Ropewalk Tavern in Fed Hill. They immediately hit it off and spent most of the evening together getting to know each other and dancing. They lost touch for a couple weeks only to reunite and they’ve been together since. Olivia is a horse lover, and they both have a mutual love for their dog, Slurpee, who gets the award as Maggie’s favorite dog name ever because of her love for Slurpees.

We are so excited to share this beach and champagne engagement session. Kaity and Tyler reached out to us about doing their pictures in Fenwick because it’s where they got engaged. The timing worked out for us because we would be down at the beach for a week and we’d love to see them and meet up for their session. 

We met Melissa and Jon on a beautiful wedding day in early October. Patrick and I photographed Melissa’s sisters wedding, and Melissa and and Jon were in their wedding party. It was an incredible day full of beautiful moments and I just remember thinking how much fun and how sweet this family was. We would have no idea that months later Melissa and Jon would get engaged and then ask us to be their wedding photographers! We can’t wait for their May wedding.

In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve literally been swimming 12 feet deep in weddings and engagements. We finally have caught up, just in time to be slammed again by a wave of awesome weddings and engagement sessions that are coming our way literally in days. We will have weddings and engagements every weekend until Thanksgiving where we have some time off. And then we have 4 December weddings. But today, we are sharing a DC wedding at the classy MayFlower Hotel in DC.

This session is super close to home for us, literally. But this couple is special to us because Danielle is the sister of one our our amazing 2017 brides, Meredith. Danielle and Shane live just minutes away from the waterfront in Columbia and felt it fitting to do their session there and capture a place where they already have existing memories. Let me just say, what a cool venue. We live 10 minutes from this place and it’s so sweet. There’s are gorgeous fountain, a pier that backs up to a lake, live concert area, and tons of restaurants. We spent our time with these guys getting to know them a little bit. We gave them a couple topics to talk about so that not only we could get to know them but they could get to know each other even better (you know, they are getting married so they obviously know each other super well!). We learned that Danielle and I both love our ballgame hotdogs lathered in either ketchup or chili cheese and chili. We learned that our men deck theirs out in everything. We also learned that they have two new kittens (man, we should have included them in the shoot!) and that if they had $10 to spend at Whole Foods, they’d clear out the Almond Croissants. They must be pretty good.