the blog

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.

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.

Internet, meet Christy and Josh! We met these guys because of a series of relationships and what a sweet wedding day they had and GORGEOUS weather. Some of our personal highlights of their day was Christy’s reveal in front of her dad, our time with them during their newlywed portrait time, watching her dad and her rock out during their father/daughter dance, her 90 year old grandma dancing, and a really sweet toast from her maid of honor. Oh and how awesome… Christy is wearing her mom’s veil! I love that!

At a bridal show last year that I did solo, a girl and her mom walk up to me and I’m like “no way!!!” It had been YEARS since I had seen Tess, as we went to Bryn Mawr around the same time and graduated high school just a couple years apart. I hadn’t seen her since then. I met Ray that night and we were so excited when they reached out again about hiring us for their wedding. We were so pumped and honored!! 

We’ve never had a bride love her rainy day wedding as much as Tiffany did. And when we say rain, we Lena like down pour. At our final meeting with Tiffany, like most our brides, she said “I totally want rain picture.” Some don’t know what that actually entails until it actually happens. Rain in unavoidable but beautiful rain pictures are for the brave and free.

Let’s just say, William and Tiffany dominated their rain pictures. Like I mean danced in the rain at the end of the night, rung out her dress mid photos, and loved that her bouquet had rain drops all over it.

This wedding was so sweet and unique. William is Jewish and Tiffany is Chinese. Together they created a beautiful wedding woven with Chinese culture including a tea ceremony with their elders and gold flaked red gift envelopes, to a Chuppah and Ketubah signing honoring Jewish law. These guys even had an outfit change to honor both.

It downpoured under the tent during ceremony while friends read readings and the challah bread was broken. It kept raining while folks danced under the rain covered white tent. Sweet toasts were shared and tears resulted as parents and wedding party shared memories and secret admiration of the bride and groom.

If there’s two people that just go together, it’s Chelsea and Matthew. We met these guys at a Bridal Show when Chelsea told me that her photographer bailed. Her dad, little did I know, was watching us from afar and approached me and said “we want to hire you. I’ve been watching and we love how you deal with people.” They literally booked us that night. Little did we know what we were getting ourselves into. I’m gonna stop for a second and say, Off Beat is exactly who these people are. They aren’t into trends, they don’t care about fame. But what they do care about is those they love, their heirlooms, their music, and of course, their mopeds.

They held hands laughing as they walking through the gardens under umbrellas in between sun and rainfall. Their bridesmaids were prepared with rain boots and smiles. Kevin and Ashley are sentimental and intentional. Kevin’s gift to his bride: a time capsule full of letters for the present and future. Ashley’s gift to Kevin: a love letter, a toast for he and his groomsmen, and a star map of their love story. One of our favorite details was a surprise gift Ashley gave to her mom, an illustration of the two of them on her wedding day. These are just a few of those details that were woven into the day.