Of course, while I’m waiting, they are working. I checked in with Mike and Nikki and asked them to share their progress and experience as they prepare for the wedding. I know how much work they are putting in and I thought you would all enjoy seeing how they pull everything together. They left their Manhattan home to visit over the 4th of July and Mike wrote about their trip and plans for the wedding:

July 3, 2010 – 113 days and counting.

It’s 10am on Saturday morning and I can already feel the beads of sweat forming on my back. Looking out on the rolling Virginia hills in front of me I can see the heat coming off the corn fields. It’s hot now, and it’s only going to get worse. Eighteen hours and one short plane ride ago we were on an air conditioned trading floor in Manhattan, and I was part of a group frantically trying to wrap up the mid year performance estimate to send to our anxious investors. But that was our real lives back at the hedge fund in New York. For this long Fourth of July weekend, and many more to come for the next several months, we’ll be down here on the Jebson’s farm sweating it out and putting in a lot of elbow grease to make their cute farm into our ideal wedding location.

This is the farm Nikki grew up in; it’s a beef farm with nearly 100 head of cattle and sits on about 150+ acres of land in Culpeper, VA, which is about 1.5 hours southwest of Washington DC. For her, this is home. For me, it’s a world away from my suburban New Jersey upbringing, and even further from my stuffy New York City studio. The Jebsons’ seem to think of this as work, for me it’s like I’m in a giant sandbox, with all my trucks, only the box is much bigger and the trucks are real. If they think that I think digging things up with backhoes is work they’re sorely mistaken.

It’s not the first time we’ve been here to work; back in June we came down for a weekend to start knocking out fences and plant a garden. This weekend we will finish the demolition, start some cleaning, and focus on painting. Every wedding guest is going to receive a homemade jar of pickled green beans and cucumbers, Mrs. Jebson’s specialty. We wanted to incorporate as many aspects of the farm as possible and this being a beef farm, the reception’s main course was an easy call.

For the ceremony we’ll be getting married on top of a hill just behind the house. It’s the highest point on the farm and in October the sun will be setting just off our shoulders but far enough to the left not to make our guests squint. We’ll face the mountains to the west, with vast cornfields down the hill to our right and cow pastures down the other side of the hill to the left. Mr. Jebson will use the tractor and planting equipment to smooth out the hill, so the land will be flattened and our guests will sit comfortably on rows of square hay bales.

Behind the ceremony, closer to the house, there is a cluster of four barns, three of them are rectangular and line up parallel to each other. One barn closer to the house is the cattle barn, where one or a few cows are kept when they’re not in the fields. It’s the biggest and most suitable for the reception with big sliding doors, a couple open sides, and it’s made of really old oak. Unfortunately it’s also full of 100 year old hay, old doors, broken tools, and just about anything else you can imagine saying “eh, just throw it in the barn” to. My main job this weekend was to continue ripping down one of the older and more beat up sides. Additionally we started cleaning it out, which means getting all the hay out and identifying what can be thrown out and what can be salvaged elsewhere. After we finish cleaning it out Mr. Jebson is going to lay a new floor of concrete.

The forth barn near the house, and closest to the ceremony is named the calf barn because that’s where they often put the babies to nurse them after birth. Nikki, armed with an electrical paint gun contraption made this white cinderblock structure a classic barn red. We also painted the windowsills white for good measure. This is the most completed thing we’ve done so far and it looks great.

There is a square fenced in area between the calf barn and the reception barn and this is where we’ll have outdoor seating around a bon fire complete with whiskey and cigars. The fence, which has been ripped down, was old and not in very good shape. Later this summer we will be building a new one and painting it white. Right now it’s hard to imagine but in three months these buildings which are more suited for barn cats and tractors are going to host an elegant dinner for nearly 200 people!

Thanks for sharing your progress and I can’t wait to document the wedding and see the hard work you’ve put in!

While this was classified as a maternity session, I think it is more aptly named a “before the baby” session. I think I like the sound of that better, and it opens up the doors for the creative freedom that took place. Taking these photos was a great way to document the unique time in Ryan and Christie’s lives as they prepare for their son to join them. Some call it the calm before the storm.

Having photographed Ryan and Christie before(and been friends with them for a while) they trusted me to do something new and different especially for a before the baby session. We set out to capture bright summer images early one morning and end the session in the nearby creek. 

They are going to be great parents… but I can’t help but love the surprise face on Ryan below

Did I mention that the session took place on Ryan and Christie’s 3 year anniversary? It’s hard to believe three years has gone by already but it’s awesome to see what time brings. Oh yeah and the lensbaby shots I talked about yesterday – here’s more of them. I love the bokeh + blurred background!

Part II of the session was planned around a refreshing walk through the creek, which gave Christie the opportunity to show off her belly! Now I know pregnancy and bathing suits aren’t for everyone, but they are for me – and Christie who looks amazing with only a month to go! In fact, the water wasn’t at all deep enough for swimming, but I think it would be awesome to do something even more in the water – any takers? It was refreshing to be at the creek as the sun came out and the day started to heat up.

Christie posed for a few while Ryan caught some crayfish… and makes pregnancy look easy. Didn’t I say the session was the start of her modeling career? I love the drama and range of tones in the black and white images.

to end the day, a kiss. It was a successful before the baby session if you ask me, and a great way to add to the celebration of their anniversary. Now it’s just time to wait for Griffin to arrive!

Before I do a full post on Ryan + Christie’s session I wanted to share this image in particular, taken with my lensbaby. If you’re not familiar with cameras you are probably wondering what in the world a lensbaby is… and to find out more you should follow the link. The basics are that the lens moves and allows you to have one point in focus with everything else being dramatically out of focus (I guess you could say it’s like a trick lens…  like when you listen to the song and start to hear robotic voices… that’s what I’ll compare a lensbaby to). Anyways, when I bought my lensbaby I was excited but it took me a while to use it. Since it can create such dramatic images at first I think I didn’t use it because I wasn’t sure it would meld with my style and the other images I captured. I didn’t want robotic voices in the song for the heck of it (and we’ve all heard those songs + seen those images), but after seeing what I captured (from the ones that are in focus – it’s super tricky manual focus) I love how it looks. Now you can expect a few robotic voices, just enough to keep things interesting.

Three years ago on this day Ryan and Christie were married. I was lucky enough to be at the wedding, as a guest and photographer, on a hot New York day much like today. Now three years later, they are weeks away from welcoming a baby boy into their family… and doesn’t Christie look amazing? I heard her secret was swimming throughout the pregnancy, which is why it was appropriate for us to head down to the creek for part of the maternity session. Congratulations you two on three years, and look out for the rest of these soon!

There really wasn’t any other time to do the session. Living in the Chicago area meant that they wouldn’t have much time in Virginia before the wedding, so we decided to do the engagement session the day before. It also meant that I wasn’t able to meet with Tommy + Megan in person prior to the wedding, but I was able to get to know them through our emails and conversations. We settled on heading into colonial Williamsburg for the shoot which was right next to the site of their wedding the next day at the Williamsburg Inn.

I was looking forward to it, and while I had stopped at many historic sites on road trips as a child, I had never made it to Williamsburg. Tommy and Megan didn’t know what to expect, but arrived as any couple would the day before their wedding: completely in love. It had been an understandably busy few days for them so the engagement session gave them some time together and away from the planning, organizing, out of town guests, family, decisions, and everything else that happens the day before a wedding. Despite being self described as camera shy, they were one of the easiest couples to photograph. Most of the photos took place in gorgeous locations right off of the main street in colonial Williamsburg, but I couldn’t help but include pieces of the city like in the photo above!

After the session we walked over to a coffee shop to get some drinks to cool us down, and Tommy said something to the effect of “while that could have been one of the most awkward experiences in my life you made it fun.” Mission accomplished. If you thought their engagement session was great then you have to stay tuned for their wedding since it was even better!

Welcome to the second part of Margaret + Luke’s Rochester engagement session, the night portion. I had been wanting to do this for a while, but it involved a lot of set up and was harder to pull off, which is why you haven’t seen it earlier. On that note, if I have any couples who want to do something similar – I would love to! We’ll just have to figure out the logistics.

For this night engagement session, we kept our picnic set up and strung up some lights for something more romantic. Long exposures and light writing completed the set of photos, and let me tell you it took multiple tries for Margaret to write love backwards for the camera – but it was worth it! I love this romantic set and we created a fun save the date for M+L where they wrote out the numbers for their date.

take 2 of the heart shot… two of many :) Save the date for 10.2.10 and can’t wait to see you then!

It’s always exciting to photograph something new. Sometimes it’s the people that inspire you, the props, the location, but hopefully it’s all of the above. It’s not always easy to have those three elements come together as it takes more planning and collaborating, but as you can see it’s totally worth it. I’ve been planning on doing a unique session like this for a while, and wanted to use it as a starting point for other sessions… so this is just the beginning. I hope to collaborate like this with other couples and come up with totally unique and creative images so let me know if you want to be involved.  This photo makes it look effortless, but if you saw the car full of props we brought with us and the hiking we did out to our locations you would be impressed. Margaret and Luke were the perfect couple to try anything and incorporated their own style and personality into the shoot, which made it even more successful. I’ll write more on planning a session like this and show you the rest of the images soon!

This love story started on the basketball court. Christy and Phil met on a church league and while that is where their story began, the first chapter wasn’t written until Christy’s trip to Zambia. Working for World Hope, she was presented with the opportunity to work in the field. She spread the news about her trip and asked family and friends to help support her, and one of those friends was Phil. They met over coffee to talk and their friendship soon developed into something more. Who would have known that a support letter would have lead to an engagement… that’s taking a support letter to a whole new level.

look at those moves! Matt and I met up with Phil and Christy in DC and spent part of our time in the district and most of it in Georgetown area, which is beautiful.

Christy left for her trip not too long after their coffee shop date which meant that they spent the first part of their relationship miles apart.

Gorgeous, right? Are you as excited for their wedding as I am?

they love each other. There’s so much more of their story to be written and I’m so excited to be a part of documenting it. Phil + Christy see you in October and good luck with the wedding planning!

Runners. There’s just something about them, something different. Their determination, dedication and hard work carries over to all other areas of their lives. Those are the qualities you definitely want to bring in to a marriage.

It didn’t take long for Michael and Kaity to meet and fall in love as they ran together in college. While they knew what it took to train and put in 100%, they also spent more and more time together outside of practice. They both ran in the marathon at nationals the year Kaity won, and Mike crossed the line and waited to be the first to congratulate her. It was fitting then, that on an afternoon run in the summer, Mike stopped to tie his shoe and came up with a ring to ask Kaity to marry him. That was just the beginning, and the planning for a day that at once seemed so far away ended up coming very quickly.

The wedding day was perfect as it only can be when you unite family and friends, especially with Ryan (Kaity’s brother) on leave from serving in Iraq. There was not lack of emotion, love, and excitement and I had a great time being a part of the day and documenting it. I’m excited to post the first of many slideshows for Mike + Kaity’s wedding, so make sure you make it to the bottom of the post to view it.

Kaity opened her gift from Michael, a monogrammed jewelry box, just before the wedding… now he just has to fill it up.

Bubble exits are so fun to photograph! I love the extra pops of color you get from all of the bubbles. After the ceremony we headed to the train station for some fun and iconic photos. It was close to the river as well so after putting on some boots I captured some images of Mike + Kaity in the gorgeous snowy scene.

To see the complete story head to their gallery for all of the photos from the day.  Use M+K’s last name as the password once you register on the site, and  leave a comment here to help them get a free 11×14 or 16×20 print (20 comments/40 comments). Congratulations again Mike + Kaity and thanks to everyone I had a great time being a part of the day.

Over at the District of Columbia war memorial we had a bit of shelter until the rain really let up. It was tucked away just off the mall so we could avoid the usual crowds.

The cherry blossoms had begun to bloom so were were able to incorporate another DC landmark into the photos, and it just looks gorgeous. I’m really tempted to make a trip over for the Cherry Blossom Festival.

We saved the best for last. There’s nothing like a good old fashioned stomp in a puddle, like what you did as a kid. I’m so glad I was able to spend some time in DC with Dave and Maria as it’s always a fun place to visit. I’m really looking forward to their wedding in October and will bring you more of their story then!