The Inn at Barley Sheaf: An Intimate wedding with Jen & Zinia

I have been a professional photographer for what feels like most of my life.

When I was 13, I picked up a disposable camera from cVS because that’s what you did in the early 2000s as a preteen.

I took a single photograph on that camera that changed my life.

I remember it not because I even have that photo anywhere but because it genuinely became a core memory from which I ended up building an entire career off of. It goes like this:

We sat on the hot asphalt of the church parking lot, overlooking the cemetery, the same spot where our mothers lined their cars to pick us up from school each day. We had been friends for our entire gradeschool career, so we knew how to make one another laugh by this point. It was in those final months before we went our separate ways for high school that I clucked the plastic shutter of a little black box wrapped in plastic purchased from CVS only one day before. It had been $13.99. I can’t remember if my mother paid for it, but I would assume she did.

As I clicked the shutter, my friend Nicole threw her head back in laughter. When I got the prints back it was one of the only photos that came out. I had captured A MOMENT. And that, my friends, is how I became absolutely obsessed with Photography.

From that moment until I was a sophomore in college, I photographed Film exclusively. It was how I learned the tool- the art form. It is now referred to the “Old School way” to learn photography, and I am so grateful for it. Film made me fall in love with the moments. The first photograph I ever took was a girl in motion, laughing. I have come to understand that this start was as pivotal as anything else that came after it. I am truly, madly, deeply, in love with making photographs that need no words to describe them. As an aspiring writer, I recognize this paradox inside myself.

What does this story have to do with Jen and Zinia, whose photographs we will be seeing today?

Because I want you to know that after photographing weddings professionally for 10 years, this is the very first client who paid me to shoot a wedding on film. More specifically, Hybrid.

Hybrid means I had approximately 8 cameras on me via various hooks and straps and bags. It was a little Embarrassing, if I’m being honest.

Jen & Zinia had seen photographs on Instagram that I had taken with a broken film camera (See that blog post HERE and read the story behind the broken camera HERE). They said that this is what they wanted. I was over the moon to deliver it.

This was a beautifully intimate wedding with under 50 guests, so I photographed this one alone without a second shooter.

We decided that I would start the day with Zinia, and when I arrived she was ready to put on her dress. Some of my personal favorite photographs were taken with a camera called a Holga, a medium format film camera made of plastic that forces me to “guess” at the focusing plane and creates a beautiful vignette around the squared edges. I decided to mimic the warm black and white tone when editing my digital images, and you can tell the difference between the film and digital here but I love how they still work well together.

Both women told me that the First Look was the part they were looking forward to most in their day.

Zinia was so nervous walking out to Jen. You could feel the energy between these two even in their brief time apart that morning, and this was probably one of the most emotional first looks I have ever witnessed.

These first half of this gallery is digital and the second half is film.

I am partial to black and white, I have an unabashed love for the timeless feel it brings (I even wrote an entire blog post about it hERE). However, when I choose to use color, I want it to be bold. I think color can give us a sense of place and I enjoy playing with lenses like the tilt shift (as seen in the first three photographs) that allow more light into the shutter therefore giving a color edit an added vibrancy that I really love. This wedding took place on the last Sunday in March, and I love how these color photographs just shout SPRING!

Mamiya Medium Format, Portra 400 film

Shooting with a broken 35 mm Camera. I wrote the story of how my kid dropped it & why I still use it on my newsletter HERE

I have a lot of fun photographing people in motion during the reception. These are often my favorite photographs of the day- the elation of the couple and everyone around them is palpable in these images. I always stay to the end of the reception because it’s true- I don’t want to miss a thing.