Happy Sunday everyone! Yesterday Kaity and I had the pleasure of photographing our second ever wedding in West Virginia, and it was actually our second wedding of the day. It was the first time in our career that we have photographed two weddings in one day, but with so many people moving to smaller intimate weddings it gives us the time to fit more loving couples into our schedule. Such was the case with Katrina and Stacey's beautiful wedding yesterday afternoon. When Katrina reached out to me we had already booked a 10 year vow renewal in the morning, but we were able to fit both into our schedule for the day and spend an entire Saturday capturing the love between 2 couples!
Mountains & Mountains of Love
I was so excited to find out that we would be photographing a wedding in Brandywine this year. When I first moved, my biggest fear was having to relocate my business. Of course, I'm still able to make the hour drive over into Rockingham County and serve my loyal and new Virginia customers, but I also wanted to establish business in West Virginia and be able to provide people within my community with gorgeous photos! My senior ambassador team has helped so much with this, and when I shared their photos from our meet and greet this year I found a lot of people from Pendleton County visiting my Facebook page, which is how Katrina found me. Photographing a wedding is actually how I fell in love with Pendleton to begin with, so it felt very fitting to finally photograph another one three years later. Kaity and I both loved the location of the Bolton wedding; a small piece of farm land nestled in Brandywine with perfect mountain views for Katrina and Stacey to finally say "I do." Katrina's son walked her down the aisle while Stacey's grandchildren were their extremely adorable ring bearer and flower girl. I loved the close knit family feeling this wedding had to offer!
It's hard for me to pick a favorite part of each wedding we photograph. I love being behind the scenes as everyone is getting ready, seeing the beautiful exchange of vows and each way that a couple makes their ceremony unique (in Stacey and Katrina's case they had each of their children read off a bible verse during the ceremony,) and enjoying the reception, where we are always welcome to mingle, dance, and have some of the delicious food provided. At the end of the day though, I am a portrait photographer and my roots run strong, so I love the moments after the ceremony when I get to take the official portraits of the new couples. Something about having creative control to collaborate with each couple and execute perfect ideas to capture their love reminds me every single time why I love my job so much! With the Bolton wedding, I was a huge fan of the arbor they had, handmade with wood and adorned with flowers and a cross, as well as having two wooden chairs sitting at each end with more floral arrangements on them. We allowed the arbor to be a main focus of a lot of the portraits and it gives them all those extra details that truly make a photo. I was happy to include a few special shots of the reception with Katrina and Stacey in their preview that I delivered tonight, but for the blog I wanted to share more of their portraits because I feel that they capture the beauty and love of this wedding and couple! It's easy to see how much love and attention to detail went into this day!
Thank you so much to Katrina and Stacey for having us yesterday. It was an honor of ours to meet and photograph both of you as well as your family. We wish you many years of a happiness and hope that these photos are ones you can cherish forever. It's a great feeling to be a part of something so wonderful!