Are Wedding Photos the Most Important? | Gainesville, TX Photographer

Unpopular opinion for a wedding photographer, but what if your wedding photos aren’t the single most important ones you’ll take? Your wedding photos are a gift to be treasured and valued because they signify the starting line, the beginning, the formation of your marriage. But what about the middle of the race? What about when you are nearing the finish line?

Hear me out. I love photographing weddings. I love seeing couples in love. I’m here for all the romance and the sentimental mementos. I love it all. There are times, however, when I believe we have a tendency to put all the focus on the wedding day and not the marriage.

We all know (in theory) that marriage can be hard work and have challenging times. As a culture, we joke about the ol’ ball and chain and allow references to marriage after 30, 40, 50, or 60 years as dull, boring, and maybe even loveless. Is that true for some marriages? Absolutely. But that’s not what we’re going for here, right?

We are going for marriages that look like this:

The same way we cherish and value photos of an engaged couple or bride and groom, let’s prioritize and put worth on photos of you, of your parents, of your grandparents, of your great-grandparents that show how they feel about each other at those marriage milestones.

Here’s the thing that I know a tiny bit about at 10 years of marriage and I hope to know more about after another 40 or 50 years. When you cultivate it, care for it, fight for it, *choose one another over and over even when it might feel easier to walk away, your love deepens and strengthens. You gain a security in knowing that your spouse kept choosing you even when it wasn’t all roses. And you did the same. That is worth celebrating.

So, are your wedding photos incredibly important? Absolutely. But I hope you’ll file this away in your mind, leave the kids and grandkids at home, and go get that fun, romantic shoot of you and your spouse at 10 years and 60 years and anytime in between.

And it’s not just for you. The couples in this post are my parents and my husband’s grandparents. I can’t tell you how much I value knowing that long after they are gone our families will have evidence of what the middle or the finish line can look like when you persevere. Are their marriages or lives perfect? Certainly not, but what a beautiful gift to see the way they still look at one another, the way they still giggle, the way they still hold hands.

If you need help getting photos of the starting, middle, or end (whether that’s yours’, your parents’, or grandparents’ love story), I’m here to help.

*Because I really care about this, I need to make sure it’s clear that you should never stay in a dangerous situation!*