But much more important than all the gorgeous details – was the love between Steph and Dan. Dan made sure to take care of Steph from the moment he saw her at their First Look, all the way through the end of the night. He was carrying her dress and flowers, wrapping her up in a blanket during our chilly (and super windy) golf cart ride to the bridge for photos, and shielding her from the sudden rain/hail that came down in the middle of portraits. It was the sweetest thing to see him always looking out for her… it just warmed my heart.

Steph & Dan – I’m sure you’re enjoying your amazing honeymoon in Hawaii, but I hope for a moment these images bring you back to that beautiful day! Back to the overwhelming love felt from your family and friends… there cheering you on (& flash-mob dancing!) during the biggest day of your lives. I already knew you two to be awesome people – but meeting your family & friends and having them all welcome us with open arms and be just as kind to us as you both have been from the start made it all the more obvious that you two are truly amazing people. I hope these images warm your heart now and in the years to come as you walk through life together  - in the words of Pastor Bob – holding each other with both hands. We wish you nothing but the best, and know you will have a beautiful life full of laughter and love!  xoxo! ~ Christy & James

(Loooved these bridesmaid dresses!)

Just radiant!

Pretty sure Steph has one of the best smiles I’ve ever seen… I just loved this moment!

Such a sweet First Look!!

It was so windy her veil attacked Dan! haha…

And then out of no where – it started to rain/hail!! Crazy!

The room at Independence Grove looked unbelievable! So pretty!

And then – a surprise flash mob dance!!! Amazing!!

Such an unbelievably gorgeous day from start to finish! Congratulations again Steph and Dan! Have a fabulous time on the rest of your honeymoon!!!

. . . . . . .

~ Vendors ~

Church: Holy Cross Lutheran Church (Libertyville)

Reception:  Independence Grove

DJ: Elite DJs

Video: Kevin Wagan Video

Anyway – now that you know the history of this photo shoot and our friendship – I should probably go ahead and show you the photos, huh?! haha I love these two so much!!! And I can’t wait for their wedding in the Dominican Republic next February!!!

Hello you two!! Gorgeous!

I’ve always loved Mel’s eyes… stunning!

A quick little change & off we go!

Steven did goooood!

Ahh!! Love these two!!!

All the days of worry and anxiety about paying our bills.

All the days of comparison and doubt.

All the days of working two full-time jobs trying to this business off the ground.

All of that felt worth it yesterday.

Because yesterday was a good day. Yesterday was the kind of day I couldn’t believe was real. The kind of day where I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.

It’s funny how things work out. Those of you that read regularly I’m sure saw this post on Monday. A post that came to be after I had a pretty tough weekend that started with me calling my mom in tears early Saturday morning.

It’s seems so silly to look back on this weekend and think that I actually believed for one second that I didn’t have enough. That I needed something more.

And now, just a few short days later… I feel like my cup is overflowing. So much so that I feel I can’t possibly deserve all I’ve been blessed with. I can only hope I give as much back to the world.

It’s funny how things come full circle – even in such a short amount of time. Isn’t it?

Last night as I was finishing an engagement session with a truly amazing couple that I love so much, I said a silent “thank you” as I snapped this photo of our stunning city.

I breathed in the warm spring air and looked at the glowing pink sky settling over the city.

I pinched myself.

I was awake.

This day was real.

… Thank you …

A few weeks later Lauren and Jessica met up to continue the conversation over mimosas and brunch, and I got the craziest, happy/hyper, text messages from both of them immediately following that chat. Their hearts were set afire. They had been talking about BIG dreams and thoughts about life, business, and everything in between… and they wanted to bring me on board for a super secret project.  They insisted we plan another meeting for all three of us where they could tell me about their ideas.

We met up at a cozy little diner, and there over mimosas and giant plates of breakfast food (naturally), they shared their dreams with me, and I immediately understood why their hearts had been set on fire. They couldn’t wait to help other people. To share their dreams, and help others make theirs a reality as well. And I felt so blessed that they wanted me to be a part of it all!

After much planning, 1 million text messages, about 500 emails, dinners, brunches, lunches, one drizzly photo shoot, and 3 big dreams molded into one later…. we are finally ready to announce to the world…

The first annual TURNING TIDES RETREAT!!!!

For all the details and information please check out the beautiful website that Lauren designed with logos & branding by Megan Koranda, complete with unbelievable images by Evan Hunt, and video by the super talented Tami Paige!

I hope you can join us for what is sure to be an amazing 3-day lake house retreat in Michigan – for creatives to build friendships, transform their businesses, and realize their dreams!! (And go on sunset boat rides, make s’mores around the campfire, swim, play games, and stay up late chatting over wine… of course!)

Check it all out & sign up HERE!  Also – we’re running an early bird special through Sunday, May 19th at 9pm central time… $100 off your seat!!

There are only 10 seats available so hop to it!!!

Can’t wait to see you there!!!! XOXOXO!

………….

**All photos in this post by the amazingly talented, Evan Hunt, of EVAN HUNT PHOTO.**

**Also – other than the videos on the website – you MUST check out the longer video Tami made for us HERE! I’m kind of obsessed… haha!**

Sometimes things work out in such a way that you can’t help but laugh, and appreciate the fact that although you may plan and plan and plan, God knows better than we do.

In fact, I was reminded yesterday when talking with a friend about all the different prayers I’ve said in my life that I’m pretty relieved ended up being unanswered. (You know the ones… “Please let this relationship work out. Please let him love me as much as I love him. Please let me get into this school. Please let me get this job… and on… and on… and on.) Because when those prayers didn’t get answered things turned out much better than I had planned, and a million times better than I could have ever imagined.

So in this next year, it is my goal to stop trying to make so many plans…

To let things go…

To understand not everything is in my control…

To trust that things will work out…

To stop worrying about things I cannot do anything about…

Instead, I’m going to do my best to live each day to the fullest, be the best person I can be, and remember that God knows better than I do.

So I checked out their site… Beautiful! The books looked stunning, and I loved their philosophy (Off your device / Into your life) and environmental policy! It is so true that so few of us actually PRINT photos anymore. And I can’t help but wonder – what happens when we’re gone? Those photos sit on Facebook and Instagram for all of eternity? What is there for our children and grandchildren to page through?

I want our kids to sit down with all these photos we printed, and books we made in their laps – and see how we lived our lives. I want them to feel something about their family. About our legacy. I want them to be moved and inspired. I want them to see where they came from and how we lived back in the ‘olden days’… And unless we make these memories available – that isn’t going to happen. (It’s doubtful they’ll go through my blog and Facebook page 100 years from now… right?!)

So – I’m over the moon happy that I’ve found an awesome company to make this a reality! Photo books! From our personal photos! Amazing!!

Here’s what we made!!! (You upload your own galleries of images and then design your book using different page templates they have to choose from in their in-site design suite – which I loved! Super quick & easy to do!)

The first was a 50-page hardcover book (square 8.5″ x 8.5″ with the partial dust jacket over the “parchment” color cover) that I used to tell the story of our trip to D.C. for the Inauguration in January! I’m not going to lie – I had envisioned this BIG FAT coffee table book (I think because a lot of the examples they have on their site are big fat books) – so I was surprised at how thin it was for 50+ pages… but I love it none-the-less! The pages are matte (not glossy or lustre), and the photos look pretty true to color (although I thought a few were a bit dim/faded compared to the originals – but who knows – that may just be the matte look).

Next up was a softcover 6″ x 8″ 40-page book that I designed to tell the story of our proposal! I didn’t have enough photos to fill all 40 pages, so I actually wrote out the story to correspond with the photos on the opposite page (which is awesome that you can add text to pages too)! I’m so excited to have this story saved somewhere to re-read as we get older!

Last but not least is a little 5.5″ x 5.5″ softcover book of ancient Chloe puppy  pictures! Okay – not really ANCIENT – but from her first 4 months with us in 2011. It’s fun to have little puppy Chloe in a book to look back on, and I hope to print more with current photos. Especially because these were taken on our crappy old Android phones before they had Instagram available – so the image quality itself is pretty terrible – and that doesn’t have anything to do with the print quality or books! That is just crappy tiny phone photos for you!

So that’s it! What do you think?! If you’ve been itching to get some photos into books – I’d definitely recommend Artifact Uprising! The books are really great quality and have some beautiful cover options! Another company I love for Instagram prints is http://printstagr.am/ - which we’ve used as well for individual prints & loved the quality of them as well!

However, I wouldn’t personally suggest using these books for wedding photos. Maybe it’s just me – but I like those in bigger, thicker, archival books, and appreciate the option to design the entire book from scratch for my couples – not using pre-set templates.

But for personal photo books for birthdays, vacations, and other stories from your life – I say go for it!

For their engagement session they wanted to hit up the area around the Newberry Library and the Chicago brown line train. And somehow we just happened to get super lucky and had one of the most beautiful spring days in the city so far for the shoot… It was nearly 80 degrees and perfectly sunny! Amazing!

These two were especially awesome and let me drag them ALL OVER the neighborhood for this shoot – including random alleyways, under the train tracks, on private front stoops, and everywhere in between. I think these photos capture their relationship so well, and hope they love them just as much as I do!

(*Side note – I’m obsessed with Liz’s stunning green eyes!! Actually, I’m a little jealous of them if I’m being honest… )

I love this series because neither of them knew the other was up to anything until I told them! haha!

Oh my goodness – these two… gorgeous!

LIZ!!! oh.my.word.

Gotta love downtown Chicago and all its wonderful fill light bouncing off buildings!

Love her emerald ring!

Eeeeeeee!!! I was already excited for their wedding… but now I’m WAY EXCITED. Love them! xoxo!

For fun – here’s a flashback to us in May of 2007 (about 2 months into dating)… just BABIES we were!

James – I cannot begin to imagine what my life would look like if I hadn’t met you in that Chicago dive bar 6 years ago!

Life has turned out to be much more than I could have ever imagined possible because I have you by my side. You are my rock, my inspiration, and my biggest supporter. I’m so blessed to call you not only my business partner, but my LIFE partner. Here’s to many more birthdays celebrated together!

Love you so much bay!!!!

*And now I’m off to give James the gift of PRESENCE on this birthday. The one perk of working for yourself (if your birthday doesn’t fall on a Saturday during wedding season) – is that you can take time off to celebrate things like this! So I’ll see you all tomorrow back here! xoxo!

To challenge myself and to keep my love for photography alive & well (not that that has ever be a problem for me) – I decided to only allow myself to shoot film for personal photos as often as possible this year. So when we decided to make a longer trip out of heading out east for Erin & Bret’s wedding, I vowed to only shoot with my Mamiya 645 film camera (which is how I first learned photography in photo school) – instead of using our digital cameras that we use for work.

It took some serious patience for me to wait to see how the photos came out… but I tell you – it’s like Christmas morning when they finally arrive!!! Here are some of my favorites from the trip! (Everything was shot with my Mamiya 645 film camera on Fuji 400h film and processed/scanned by Richard Photo Lab.)

After Erin & Bret’s wedding on Chesapeake Bay near Baltimore, MD, we drove down to D.C. Sunday to see the cherry blossoms and unwind a bit after our first wedding of the year. The cherry blossoms were a little after their peak… but they were still gorgeous – so I couldn’t complain! Especially since the weather was still freezing back in Chicago – but it was in the 70′s in D.C. Such a perfect spring trip!

I feel like I get so nervous I’ll blink and ruin the photo (but not realize it) when using film that I stare VERY intently at the camera. haha! I swear I’m not this intense!

I could not get enough of the blooms!!! We didn’t even have buds on our trees yet in Chicago back in March!

My handsome husband!

A little self-timer action… the only place we could find to set the camera down since we didn’t bring a tripod…

The other thing about film is that you don’t realize when something is off about a photo & don’t know to retake it! (Like my nose being crazy crunched and weird looking in this kissing self-timer photo… haha! Oh well, it’s 1 of 2 photos we have together from the trip – so I’ll take it!)

Then we started to make our way back to the hotel for the night…

Did I mention I was loving the flowers?!

We got a crazy awesome deal on a Kimpton Hotel downtown because we booked on Expedia (without knowing what hotel it was, just the star rating) about an hour before check-in. It was such a cool space – and the hallways were HUGE and went on for what felt like miles!

The next day we hopped in our rental car and drove 4 hours over to Roanoke, VA to spend some time with James’ Grandmother. I had never met her before, and James hadn’t seen her in much too long – so it was absolutely wonderful to get some quality time with her! We slept over Monday night and spent some of Tuesday with her before heading back to D.C. again.

I’m actually obsessed with the image below. This was taken as we were getting in the car to leave on Tuesday after we’d taken his Grandmother out to lunch. She looked so positively joyful smiling at us from her front walk – that I couldn’t help but snap a picture before she had time to react to me picking up the camera. This is the smile she has on her face nearly all the time – and it is the sweetest thing. I’m so happy I was able to catch it.

We got back to D.C. just in time to meet James’ Aunt Debbie and cousin Shar for dinner and drinks! We had a fabulous time and lots of laughs with these two!

Then as the sun was setting over D.C. James and I headed over to see the monuments (via rental bikes) that we had missed earlier. We of course found the prettiest (still peak) cherry blossom trees on the other side of the Tidal Basin … but we were losing light so the film images are a bit blurry because of the wind and slow shutter speeds. I did take some with my iPhone that turned out – but for some reason I actually really love the look of these, blur and all… especially the last one.

It was a wonderfully exhausting trip – but we loved every moment of getting to see James’ family and spending some quality time just the two of us being tourists in D.C. as well. I was originally going to mix in my iPhone photos with these… but decided not to. I didn’t want them to tarnish the experience of looking through the film.

I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!

Whenever I start to overanalyze things and become worried about inquiries, bookings, and paying the bills – I sit at my desk and start to crunch numbers.

Any and all numbers…. projected income, bills, taxes… and who knows what else.

The funny thing is that you think it would stress me out, but instead it actually calms me down. It makes me feel like I have some control over SOMETHING. (Even though in reality I probably don’t! haha) Or at the very least it makes me feel like I’m aware of our circumstances and know what we need to do to make it through the next couples months. (My photography friends who I’ve talked budgets with are well aware of my obsession!)

Yesterday I spent a good portion of an hour categorizing all the inquiries throughout the last year in my gmail. In the past I just categorized what type of photography inquiry it was (baby, family, wedding, proposal, elopement, etc), but this time on top of that I went through and marked which inquiries booked, which I was available for that didn’t book, and which I had to turn away because I was already booked for that date.

I worked out the numbers and figured out the percentages for each category and where I could improve. Yeah.. this is my crazy way of dealing with slow-season for booking. haha. Even though every year I’m aware that March & April are dead slow for inquiries (and May is mostly slow… but starting to pick up now) – I still have freak outs and overanalyze it all… every.single.year.

Poor James has to sit here and listen to me worry out loud that we won’t book any weddings for the next year and that we’ll go out of business and no longer get to do what we love. And every year he tells me to calm down – that this time of year is always slow for inquiries and everything will be okay. I half believe him, tell him he’s right… and then I go in my office and crunch numbers. And I feel better. (At least until the next month comes around and the number crunching begins again… haha)

Please tell me I’m not alone here… right? Maybe it’s a Type A thing and plenty of you other business owners out there do this too?! Yes?!