How and Why We Became Wedding Photographers | Wednesdays with Us
When we first got married, our lives were crazy. We got married just out of college, Brandon was 24 and Lindsay was 22 and neither knew what our dreams were.
We barely saw each other because Brandon worked a 9-to-5 job that he wasn’t in love with, and Lindsay had two part-time jobs with a lot of work in the evenings and on the weekends. Although we were happy with our lives together, we felt like we never saw each other.
Did you know that Brandon and I first met on set at the TCU film studio? The first interaction we really had together was working on a short film that Brandon wrote and directed. When we were dating, we bonded so much through doing creative things together. Just before we got engaged, we went on a trip to Belize while we were in college, and we filmed the trip as a team of two and created a short documentary. This experience wasn’t all that wonderful, and we didn’t work well as a team. However, we learned a lot about ourselves and one another by working together.
Before we dive into the photography (and videography) side of things, there is one important thing that you should know about us. Just shy of one year into our marriage, we decided we wanted to live our lives with financial freedom. We were basically working to earn enough to pay our bills, and it was SO tiring. Each month we’d get paid and wave to our money as it flew out the door to all the things we were responsible for never understanding how we had no play money at the end of it all. We picked up the book The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey and started to dream about one day not having to live this way. This is a key part of our business journey because it is a part of the reason we thought to start a business in the first place! This business has been an amazing blessing to our debt-free journey. We promise to share this whole story at a later time!
With that said, when friends of ours asked us to film their wedding right around our one-year anniversary, we spent a lot of time talking and praying about it before saying yes. I didn’t wanna do anything to damage our relationship because we were working really hard in those first years to build it up. We didn’t know it yet, but saying yes to filming Christine and George’s wedding day truly changed the course of our lives (and their lives too)! That cold day in November, we got a small taste of what it would be like to work together again, and instead of it being extremely difficult, it was fun, exciting, and joyful to get to stand next to each other and work together.
How did we get from filming weddings to photographing weddings? Not long after we filmed Christine and George’s wedding, it was clear that we loved weddings, but we wanted to be more a part of the process. We wanted to know our couples like friends. We started to shift our focus to photographing weddings because we felt like we had more time to get to know people. We loved filming weddings! But, when we discovered that we could be so much more involved with our couples and the wedding day through photographing their wedding, our service-minded hearts lept for joy. We loved getting to experience the beginning through the end when it came to serving our couples and we felt like we didn’t get the chance to do that when we were filming weddings. We are grateful for our beginnings as wedding videographers, but once we made the choice to be exclusively photographers, we never looked back!
Now let me pause here for a second and say that working with your spouse can be wonderful at times, but it can also be very difficult at times. You have to wear two different hats. Sometimes, you put on the wife hat and have to be extremely loving and encouraging and forgiving. However, when you’re wearing the boss hat you can’t be all of those things all of the time. Though, Brandon always shows me extra grace when it comes to this area of our business. The most important thing to remember is we are all human and we are all learning, me and Brandon both. So we do have better days working together, but it’s not always all flowers and sunshine. 😊
We’re so grateful for those early years. For families and couples that trusted us with their important moments. We’ve learned so much about ourselves, our cameras, running a business, and serving people as business owners. We never want to forget our beginnings as wedding videographers and photographers. I am so grateful for the journey that this business has taken us on. As we head into a new decade, I can’t imagine what the next 10 years will hold. I never would have thought that these last 10 years would be so jam-packed with everything that happened. So many moments were filled with trusting in God’s nudges and saying yes even when we weren’t 100% sure of the outcome. I am SO grateful for this life, and so much of that has to do with each of you.
We have loved sharing about ourselves over the last few months! We hope you feel like you know us better!
Till next time, friend.
Lindsay & Brandon
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