I’m working on a number of weddings and engagement sessions to post here, but for today, I want to share this. We had a meeting the other day with a couple who booked us for their 2013 wedding, and the bride asked us, “Why weddings?” Of all the things we could shoot, why do we choose weddings. Our work days average at 12 hours. For out-of-town weddings, that stretches to anytime from 16-17 hours to days away from home. We’re always on our feet and we shoot in either unbearable heat or torrential downpour, sometimes both on the same day. As a wedding isn’t a controlled environment like editorial shoots, it happens that we get limited time to shoot and have to pull off shooting in not-so-ideal lighting situations. I couldn’t possibly express it in words exactly “why weddings”, but I tried. I’ll try to write it all down later. I want to share these two stories first.
We shot their engagement session and wedding back in 2009, and they made me so ridiculously happy. They were so open and game for anything and we had FUN with them. Jeff and I were very, very new to weddings then, but these two trusted us so much, they even got Janah’s cousin Gary and good friend Marie to book us for their respective weddings, too. (I have so much love for these three couples, I cannot even begin to tell you. Gary and Aileen just gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, and Marie and Javi have a boy about as old as our son, but both are overseas now so we haven’t met their babies yet. We want to get all their kids in one photo!)
Yanna is Jong & Janah’s firstborn, and we shot their family while I was pregnant. She’s so adorable and such a happy baby, it took everything I had not to squish her. I remember seeing Jeff hold Yanna during the shoot, and that was a nice moment for me. He was so awkward holding her, as he wasn’t used to holding babies yet then, but the happiness I saw in his eyes touched me, and I remember thinking proudly, “That’s the father of my child.” Janah recently gave birth to their second daughter and we’ve been texting about breastfeeding, of all things. I can’t wait to see their littlest one!
Rich and Vee are based in London, but we’ve managed to keep in touch since their 2010 wedding through social media. We’re friends on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Despite the distance, we got to keep tabs with them through their pregnancy and see their boy grow up, too. Little Daniel is going to school now, and I feel almost a sense of pride over how much he’s grown already even though I’ve had nothing to do with it. Haha. They came to visit relatives in Manila a couple of months ago and we got to shoot them then. I got to hold Daniel. He raised his arms and asked me to carry him, and my heart felt like bursting. I wanted to tell him how I knew his parents before he was born, and that we shot their wedding photos, and that I hope he’ll see through them the kind of love that brought him into this world. But I was too busy basking in the glow of his affection. I just hugged him tight instead.
Why weddings then? It’s because we find kindred spirits here. People who see the world the same way find us, and we somehow get to be a part of their lives in a significant way. Because everyday we go to work, we get to do something so very important to two people, something they will forever hold dear. It’s not changing the world, but documenting all that is right and good about it at that specific moment in time to two specific people. That’s a tangible difference in a few people’s lives, and that means the world to us.
And then there are the couples who stick around — the couples who keep in touch, who become and stay our friends, and their beautiful, precious children that we get to see growing up; the couples who keep tabs with our life and our work, and the little man who keeps us on our toes and fills our home with so much love. We get to be a part of each other’s Ever Afters, and this, this is why we love what we do.
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