Our Wedding
Saturday, October 30th, 2004Back in 2004, Amanda and I lived near Raleigh, NC. I was finishing up the Special Forces Qualification Course, and Amanda worked for NC State in their distance education department. We were engaged to be married, and although I didn’t even have an inkling that I would one day become a wedding photographer, the quality and style of our wedding photography was our number one priority in planning our wedding.
We stopped in at Helios for a coffee one day, and found a card for a young lady named Kyra Shelley, advertising “lifestyle photojournalism.” We had a limited idea of what that meant, but we thought it looked interesting and unconventional. We met with Kyra, and found that she pursued a style of wedding photography that included almost no posed pictures: a documentary of the day as it happened. She shot exclusively on black and white film, in both 35mm and medium formats. She developed and printed all of her work by hand. We were thrilled with this unusual approach, and although it far exceeded the original budget we’d set for photography, decided to book Kyra.
Our wedding photos aren’t flashy or trendy. We don’t look like supermodels. However, when we look back through our wedding album, or to the prints on the walls of our bedroom, the images serve as a window into the past. They’re real. They’re non-fiction photographs. They’ll never go out of style because the content is meaningful to us, and Kyra did a great job of catching characteristic expressions and subtle moments.
So when I prepare to photograph a wedding for my clients, I like to think back to the images that matter to us now (almost five years later as I write this), and focus on creating images with meaningful content.
image by Kyra Shelley
image by Kyra Shelley
image by Kyra Shelley
image by Kyra Shelley
image by Kyra Shelley
image by Kyra Shelley
image by Kyra Shelley
image by Kyra Shelley
image by Kyra Shelley
image by Kyra Shelley
image by Kyra Shelley
image by Kyra Shelley
