2023

Hi! Just like last year - I thought I would reach out to a couple who in my opinion, felt completely present and joyful during their wedding. I wanted to give them the opportunity to share with future couples what helped them achieve that feeling - and as always - they came through with the best answer. Before getting to that, I do want to thank every single person I interacted with this year whether it was the wedding client themselves, or their relatives - for supporting me as I was pregnant for all but two weddings I photographed this season. I was really scared of how being pregnant would affect my work and my ability to do my job - and instead of leaving it full of fear I was eternally grateful for the shared joy and support that I received. I will NEVER forget this season of weddings and work, and for that I am SO grateful.

Sincerely, Abbey

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Max and I had been to nearly twenty (!) weddings together in the two years prior to getting married. When we began planning ourselves, we wrote down a list of all the things we loved most about all the weddings we had attended before. Beautiful toasts that made us cry. Seeing the couple absolutely tear it up on the dance floor. Ceremonies that were deep and spoke to why the couple is perfect for each other. And many other small and big moments in between.

As we thought about those moments, our hope for our own wedding was to find a few guiding principles that would become our North Star. In our minds, if everything was filtered through this North Star, we could make better decisions, focus on what truly mattered to us, and let everything else fall away. For us, it looked like this:

• Is the wedding weekend meaningful and emotional?

• Is it outrageously fun?

• Is it personal and authentic to us?

• Do our guests feel relaxed and connected to the experience?

For every couple, those priorities will look wildly different. But my advice would be to begin with an explicit North Star about how you want to feel during the wedding before you get to what you want it to look like. Having this North Star concept improved the planning process, as we could more quickly and easily make decisions (and oh my gosh, there are so many decisions). But more importantly it allowed us to be so much more present during the wedding weekend itself because the little things weren’t clouding our vision.

When you look at the photos of our wedding, our North Star shines through (as we hoped and knew it would). Abbey listened deeply to the way we wanted to experience and remember the day, and captured the most true and real moments throughout. Her photos reflected the life and community we are building together everyday, not just the most beautiful, polished versions of ourselves.

The author Annie Dillard once wrote “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” This was ultimately our North Star - to live our wedding day as we hope to live our lives. Joyous, beautiful, outrageously fun, imperfect, and full of expressive, ever-present love.

Written by Catherine Baxter (the sweet couple you see right below)