natalieprice

I have been editing the images for a wedding I shot awhile back and I began thinking over the different weddings I have attended and been a part of and how wonderful they are (usually).

Weddings can be boring and they can be fun, but they always seem to bring heightened emotions (which make them all the more interesting to me). The heightened emotions add to the story and make each wedding and each couple unique – regardless of whether they use the same theme colors and location as someone else.

Weddings are also fascinating to me as a photographer, because of all the action happening both onstage and off, before the ceremony and after. There are so many details that often get overlooked, and fleeting emotions that are often forgotten. It is a challenge to develop an eye to catch all the excitement, but it is exhilarating when you succeed!

Another aspect of weddings that intrigues me is the perspectives of the people involved. How does each person view and value the wedding, the couple, the future? When I am the photographer, I usually get the fly-on-the-wall experience and see everyone’s opinions through their attitudes, interactions, and facial expressions.

The biggest, most important part of weddings is the fact that they bring people together. The couple. The family. Their friends. Through the things that go wrong (and there are always things that go wrong), people are brought together.

A couple of my friends got married a while back and I remember they were in that series of weddings where everyone’s color was deep RED. It was early afternoon on a Saturday. The wedding was indoors and the bride and bridesmaids were all barefoot. I brought my boyfriend. A lot of things happened that weren’t planned, including a table falling over on someone and the snacks disappearing too quickly, but I also remember another friend of the couple who decided that he would give them his TV (a nice flat screen), so he just loaded it up and took it to their new place. In the end, the important things happened (they got married, after all), and the rest made their day unique and special.

I know there are a lot of stories that do not have a happy ending, and ties are severed. And maybe that’s why it has become so important for people to document a day of happiness; so that the moment of joy is not forgotten, even if love sours. But I still support weddings and marriage and people working hard to make it happen. I still believe that even when the heart-breaking things happen, love is still worth fighting for. Within love there is so much potential for goodness. And maybe that is why I love being involved with weddings the most, I get to be a part of that potential.

Here’s to weddings, people, and love. May they continue to happen, last, and grow.