Dear Diary, It's me Rose, destination wedding photographer!
In my last entry, I confessed this has become a diary of sorts for me. So I figure I share a bit more about me, IRL. (IRL is what the kids shorten for ‘in real life’! Confession, I am still learning all the short cuts and often use them all wrong, kinda like my favorite IG personality Lili Hayes., even though I’m most technically a #millennial! ) My usual go-to on blog entries is to wax poetic about my day job and the amazing RP Crew I get to work with creating wonderful wedding day imagery. Lately, though, I’m working on challenging myself to share more about me and why I work the way I do so I can connect better with you all. After all, we all put our pantsuits on one leg at a time, right?? I’ve also found myself very inspired by other artrepreneurs. I’d really love to continue to build these authentic connections all around the world that allow me to make more genuine portraits, wedding or editorial.
Right out the gate, you must know I’m border line obsessed with flowers. So much so that about 15 years ago I choose to skip my first name and only be called by my middle. A few years after that, I had an idea to bring my bossy, big sister attitude of production, imagery making and the love for all things shiny into a proper business plan and launched Rose Photo. My crew and I work often on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, travel a ton for #destinationweddings and have recently opened a second studio in gorgeous Asheville, North Carolina. You can probably guess that my airline points are sky rocketing lately and I drink a lot of caffeine to keep up on work between all the time zones! My crew’s most recent travel has taken us Bloomington, Indiana for a perfect pastel set of wedding nuptials we captured on one of the hottest midwest days all summer long.
I have always really despised the color pink: especially milkshake pink. But when my dear sweet angel of a bride featured in this Indiana, soft-hued wedding blog told me her colors for her wedding day included that color and I always direct my crew to dress in line with the colors of the day, I thought: ‘sh*t! I’m gonna have to wear milkshake pink, aren’t I?!’ The week I began to pack for this destination wedding, I could find zero shades of said pink hues in my wardrobe, obviously. Then, as luck would have it and to my great astonishment, I found a perfect pantsuit in the exact shade Erica had shown me. I was doing the whole Mari Condo thing and dropping off some treasured yet unneeded fashion pieces at my fave consignment shop and the dear shop owner pulls this milkshake pink suit out from the backroom as if she knew??!! She then said, ‘Would you just try this on please!?’ Stunned and also always a sucker for an older lady, mom like request, I did just that.; can I just tell you, it looked hella good on me!? So now, now I like pink!
Part of the reason that I love photographing weddings so much is that I love storytelling. I think this is really quite common with most photojournalists turned wedding photographers as a natural progression to using a camera as a microphone to tell a love story. I’m also a theater geek that has had many mini bouts of storytelling through performance on stage. It’s occurring to me now, dear diary, that I’m maaaaaaybe jonesing for a little more live audience experience. Who knows?? Maybe I’ll turn up that IGTV channel soon!?
As a young kid on through high school and evening in college, I was kinda a social butterfly and didn’t’ keep just one posse of pals. I most certainly learned this from my mama. She never met a stranger and cared greatly for all her relationships. In many ways, I’m a lot like her. My love of fashion and my creative soul are absolutely inherited from her. One of those really special relationships my mom developed was really with a secret agent angel and she is the bride featured in this very dear, diary entry. Erica showed my mom such grace in Mom’s last two years before she passed and for that, I am forever grateful to Erica and the family that raised such a beautiful person.
I don’t like kids but I love to photograph them. I started photographing weddings 12 years ago. Once, on a really big wedding day when I was just a little, baby intern, my mentor told me: ‘If you mess up wedding photos, you would mess up the couples’ life!’ Ok, no pressure!! This naturally this scared the ba-jezus out of me so I stepped away briefly from weddings onto the next most challenging subject: children. I took to these tiny subjects easily, likely because I’m really just a big kid myself . Then, because life is real funny life this, a studio that hired me to handle their kiddo content convinced me to take another go with weddings and I fell back in love all over again.
I’d say my very favorite part of a wedding day is the first look because I really love playing producer, staging the scene and slowing down the rush of the day to totally focus on our couple. I love to remind our love birds that the two of them are the reason for the season and truly, this day is, in fact, all about them! Pausing to acknowledge this and also set up a slow-motion shot is why I do what I do! Oh and one day, when I grow up, I want to be a director of photography.
I love location scouting before our weddings begin and the wedding venue we had the pleasure to photograph for Erica + Jared’s wedding was just so sweet and sooo beautiful. The Wilds is just a quick drive from super cute Bloomington and the venue owner worked previously as a professional photographer. She absolutely has her eye on good lighting, the exactly right back drops for perfect detail shots and the surrounding areas are picture-perfect, even in the smoldering, high temps of a July summer day!
well Dear Diary friend and fans of Erica + Jared, you now know more about why I love the love and my reason for the season of being a destination wedding photographer. Have camera, will travel! I love story, perfect light, and dear souls. I hope to cross paths with more of all the good stuff that makes wedding photography a dreamy job and my life’s work!
