With only 2 more days of January 2020 left, we wanted to today go through and share with you our favorite wedding moments of 2019! We just returned from our belated Annual Christmas Family Visits to California and Arizona a few days ago, so we’ve been non-stop slaving away at new printed product orders from clients in Tennessee, Ohio, and Illinois over the past 2 days, setting up new wedding consultations for more 2020 and 2021 weddings, and packaging/ shipping the new orders, so finding time to curate this year’s 2019 Best of Weddings has been a STRUGGLE over the past couple days (i.e. we cannot WAIT to get to sleep late tonight and sleep in tomorrow before more work)! After over 10 years of our career in Professional Wedding Photography and the days flying by we’re just a few months out from the start of our Wedding Season for 2020. This past year we photographed weddings in Italy, California, Michigan, and Indiana mostly and our couples came in from 2 countries and six states in 2019: Germany, New York, Tennessee, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, and Michigan. Over the past 10 years we’ve gotten to photograph couples in from 18 states (and have gotten to photograph weddings in about 8 states and three countries). It's such a joy to get to work with couples from far and wide throughout the year or two leading up to their wedding day and we truly appreciate each and every one of our brides and grooms.
With the wedding day being one of the most important and symbolic days of many people's lives, it's a complete honor for us to get to be there for our couples and be a positive support throughout the day and time leading up to it. We get to know all of our couples' personalities intimately through in-person meetings, emails, and calls throughout the year or two prior, working on their wedding day schedule together with them, and even have the pleasure of getting to capture some of our couples' Engagement Sessions a year prior to their wedding (**which really helps us figure out how to work with their specific body language). Our couples often share their excitement, struggles, family stories, aspirations, fears, career changes, physical moves (state/ city), family plans, and everything in between with us during the process of us working together for the first 365 days or more. The most amazing thing about genuinely getting to know and empathize with a couple so far prior to capturing them on their wedding day is that by the time their wedding happens we're honestly very excited for them, have become friends, and are able to capture the moments of the day in the most authentic and unique way specific to each couples' personalities! As you'll see, each wedding is gorgeous and each of our couples is uniquely different, but equally amazing. We spent a lot of our year laughing and crying with these wonderful couples and have chased all of them around through their entire wedding day, so...
...without further adieu, we want to share with you our favorite wedding photographs from 2019! There are hundreds of collaged photos, so keep scrolling and enjoy!
We were honored to photograph these absolutely amazing, hard-working, educated, career-driven, animal loving, amazing couples ever at a plethora of beautiful venues in the past year-! Among all of the weddings above of 2019, we were able to capture a gorgeous wedding at a villa in the Siena, Italy countryside, many University of Notre Dame weddings at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, got to photograph Morris Inn at ND receptions, other receptions literally IN the Notre Dame Stadium, weddings in Indianapolis, weddings at resorts, a wedding at the Serbian Hall in South Bend, a wedding at the historic Polish Catholic Church in South Bend, Armory receptions, The Brick receptions, one of our couples coming out of their wedding in a literal GONDOLA (and it wasn’t even for the one in Italy!), weddings at barns, weddings at awesome grade school Catholic churches that our couples attended, non-religious wedding ceremonies, and MORE!
The entire year was a semi blur of joy and hard work in this our busiest year in literally 10+ years! Though we finished up with all but two items for all of our couples (since they have to finish choosing their final items for us to design and print) we are still working diligently on new orders and Print Credits for December clients that we photographed all during Christmas week-! It's been quite the whirlwind and it was definitely the most successful and busy professional wedding photography year that we've had up to this over 10 years of professional wedding photography.
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Although most of you likely celebrated your Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa, etc. holidays & got see your immediate families and loved ones then, we worked 7 days a week on our client photo products in December and as usual took our Christmas belated in mid-January. A few days ago we literally just returned from staying at 6 households when visiting 24 family members during our annual Holiday Family Visit to see our immediate families out West (CA & AZ). Though Jason’s brother just had their daughter just before fall set in 4 months ago, Jenny’s sister is now pregnant too, so we foresee at least 2 more trips for Jenny out to Arizona this Spring and Summer for the baby shower and birth of our 2nd niece or nephew! It was nice getting back to our 3 fur children earlier this week, but it’s been hard balancing taking care of them an this new tidal wave of work this week since we have no employees other than ourselves to carry the workload.
We've been going non-stop since last January, so this has been our first opportunity to go back through the over 50,000 photos of the weddings that we captured over the past year and choose out our favorites-! It has been a days-long process to narrow down these photos (and has been the first Wednesday in a long time where blog work went from day turned night turned NEXT day), but it was all worth it to be able to look back at the past year's amazing couples and beautiful moments-! We will be shipping out 3 more physical product orders tomorrow, have some weddings to chat with couples about in person this weekend, and then we delve into finishing up final products for other 2019 shoots… then updating our website with all 2019 weddings, Family Portrait Sessions, Engagement Sessions, Headshots, and more! It’s currently 1 a.m. here and we’re exhausted from a very long 4 days straight of catching-up-from-2-weeks-of-absence work (and from the colds we just got over at the beginning of the trip across the country), so we cannot wait to head to bed-!! **Check back next Wednesday for another blog post: A 4 month very belated show-and-tell about our 2 week trip to Italy that ended with photographing our couple’s Siena wedding-!!