Wedding at The Rickhouse | Durham, NC | Megan and Ryan

wedding

Nov 14

From the first time we met, just down the street from where their wedding at the Rickhouse would take place, I really admired the way that Megan and Ryan fit together. It has an old soul quality about it. As Ryan and I found our common ground of loving photography and specifically film photography, which if you have not been around people who love film - it can be somewhat fanboyish. After about ten minutes of the two of us passionately detailing experiences and philosophies about photography, I mentioned we should pause and bring Megan back into the conversation before we bored her to death - and she just smiled, rolled her eyes and said she was used to it. No ego and all poise, while Ryan and I were all ego and no poise - boys with toys.

So that’s when I popped the question. The same question I had asked so many couples: “How would you feel about your final gallery being delivered in all black and white?”

They looked at each other. Ryan seemed game from the get-go (though I would later learn that Ryan is color blind and so I could understand how black and white photography is more appealing), Megan was a touch (and understandably) apprehensive - this was after all their wedding. But I assured her that if when they received the gallery that if she preferred color, outside of what I would be shooting in black and white medium format film, I could re-edit in color. And so she said yes.

And that’s when I fell in love with these two.

This was a dream of mine since I began photographing weddings. To bring the same adventurous, raw and thoughtful style and focus it through a classic lens - as there is nothing more classic than black and white photography.

Over the course of the next several months, we chatted back and forth via Instagram and jumped on a video call to catch up, shoot the shit and talk about the wedding details. Every time I felt like I was catching up with old friends.

Their wedding day was just a culmination of all the great experiences I had already had with them but surrounded by the people that raised them, grew up with them and know them so intimately. To see who helped to shape their lives and to support their growth - individually and as a couple, was really beautiful.

People think that photographing weddings is amazing because it’s all happiness. But that’s not entirely true, what I love about weddings is that it is, at least in my experience, absurdly real. It’s as if two families have invited you (a relative stranger) to a holiday dinner at their home, not necessarily to sit with but to simply witness the interactions and relationships and take notes. You see everything from the hysterically funny to the tongue in cheek ribbing to the aunt who still spits on her finger and wipes that thing off of your face to the frustration between siblings to the parents who waver between trying to make sure everything goes accordingly to outright Buddha-like patience and the ability to stand back and just take in the moments to the grandma who wants to tear up the dancefloor and direct the chaos from time to time and of course to the friends who stop by and say some outlandish things that make you cringe because your parents aren’t supposed to know that story but that you welcome in any way because they are damn near like family. This is what weddings are like for me.

And Megan and Ryan’s wedding was all of those things in some form or another, maybe minus the finger swabbing aunt.

Everything felt charged with emotion. Everyone was smiling. Everything felt like the Ryan and Megan I had come to know - from the ceremony to the florals, to the cocktails, to the music. Certainly, some of that goes to their amazing wedding planner Emily Izak and no doubt a lot of it goes to them.

And like most of my couples, it didn’t just end with the end of their wedding night.

Ryan and Megan waited for me to get home from a trip so that I could be there via video to see them go through their gallery and photos, which is hands down my favorite part of the entire experience - getting to relive the whole day over with my couples, to see them feel those feelings again, to see them remember what they saw and be surprised by what they didn’t see.

As I said, they were the first couple to take me up on my “crazy” idea of an entire wedding gallery being in just black and white. And at one point of going through everything, Ryan got up to get something to drink and Megan had this to say which sent me over the moon:

“I was surprised, I never once wished that any of these were in color as we went through our entire gallery.”

File that under things I longed to hear a couple say.

Now if I could just convince them to move closer.