Looking back, looking forward; winter Washington wedding photography
Wanting to honor the first wedding I ever shot as I close in on one year since doing so; how winter Washington wedding photography became my gateway into the whole ballgame.
When I made the decision to start getting into professional photography, I knew what all others do: weddings are the thing to do. And I idly commented to my mother at the onset of the Summer of 2025 that I'd like to 'get into shooting weddings', not knowing exactly how the heck to do that.
I spent the next couple months getting connected to every wedding photography or wedding-adjacent group, feasting on any post that looked like it could possibly offer a chance or a foot in the door. And then Kim makes a post that almost explicitly felt tailored to me: "need a second shooter and am okay with taking someone with no experience". Even though I read the post on my laptop, my hand shot up like I was a kid who knew the answer before everybody else.
"Me! Me! I have no experience shooting weddings!"
I have the benefit of being a naturally affable person, certainly, but being assigned the groomsmen also helped me feel more comfortable in the shoes of the job. And doing so allowed me time to work, to play around, and to start to find those little moments that exist in every wedding that are worth capturing.
Shooting weddings is both exhausting and exhilarating. If you have done your work (or had the work done for you by a skilled lead photog/wedding planner), you can and should have the time needed to enjoy the day. Because weddings are, of course, an uniquely human thing. To make a party out of what a wedding actually is is so silly in a vacuum, and so beautiful in the whole.
And of course the added element of the honor you as the photographer feel to be invited inside such a special moment. Not just for the union itself, but for the fact that it's a large group of people all coming together from (often) disparate situations. Compounded by the knowledge that it's likely that there are people in that room who either haven't seen each other in years, or will never see each other again. To even have the chance of getting good pictures out of that is an added bonus.
Kim took a chance on me, but so did Tim and Isabelle (the beautiful couple in this story) by being willing to have an inexperienced second shooter at their wedding. I'm grateful for all of it! And I already can't believe how far I've come.
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