Moments Captured

I have dipped my feet into the river of wedding photography. It's something I never had any inclination to do, but it's one place you can make money doing photography so I gave it a chance. And now that I have gotten myself into it, I want to produce the best work I can.

Which to me means giving my customers more than just a book full of shiny posed photos. I want to tell the story of their wedding. I want my finished product to be a living fairy tale, filled with moments, funny and intimate and honest, all driven on by the narrative of the event.

Forget starchy posed pictures of the forced-smiling couple leaning over a huge wedding cake trying to look comfortable. I want to capture that moment they have when they think nobody is looking. Whether it's a glance or a conversation, it's real, and that matters to me. And the fact that I froze it in time will matter to them too, maybe not right away, but it will.

I want to capture the essence of what happened that day so that when the couple looks back years on down the road, the whole thing will come to life again in their minds. And what they will see when they look into their album are the real moments, not nice neat rows of relatives in fig-leaf poses.

When I tell couples about this kind of "photojournalistic" photography they instantly love it, and they all want it.

But then they get a really strange look on their faces and ask "Can we get SOME posed pictures? You know, for Grandma."

Maddie Moments

Maddie is changing by the minute. Any given "Maddie Moment" will never come again, so we'd better all pay attention.

She's putting words together into better and better sentences, like:

"Thangoo, Daddy"

And

"Jakie barkin', Jakie eh noisy!"

For entertainment she likes reading books, watching movies, and playing with her blocks and her Styrofoam doll clothing.

"Fishie Moomie" (Finding Nemo) is her current darling, the "Doggie Moomie" (101 Dalmatians) having fallen slightly out of favor.

She also likes to imitate anything that Zach does. She follows him around and mimics his every move. It's especially cute when she mimics him doing yoga on the Wii. This of course annoys him to no end.

Like any real girl, she loves chocolate, anytime, anywhere. She doesn't just enjoy it, she imbibes it like breathing in the scent of fine incense. She goes into another world and doesn't come back until it's time to say:

"Moire chockate peesh, Mommy"

She is very conscious of how she looks, she loves to put on beads, hats, sunglasses, and shoes. She has become quite adept at walking across the floor (and even up stairs) in Heather's shoes.

She is also deep into the terrible two's, perfecting frustration fits and throwing tantrums like a pitching machine. She knows what she wants and she's not afraid to let us all know, for as long as it takes for us to get the point. Plus five minutes.

This is all part of growing up, she's learning how to handle different situations and pushing the limits of her new found abilities, both mental and physical.

She's very tall too, right up at the top of the charts. She uses all that height to climb everything in sight, spider-monkey-like. No fear. None. Zero.

Our jobs are simple, really...we just try to roll with it and enjoy each Maddie Moment before it's gone.