This week we wanted to share a variety of our couples’ momentous June wedding anniversaries that happened last month! We’ve been photographing weddings over the past 10 years, so we actually have a spreadsheet of peoples’ wedding dates from the past 10 years, so sometimes we like to re-visit that list, find out whose wedding anniversaries just happened/ are coming up, and look back through their photos. We weren’t able to get to this last month in June due to so many weddings and Engagement Sessions that we were photographing non-stop last month, so we figured since we don’t capture Mollie & Bobby’s Engagement Session until tomorrow that this is the perfect moment to squeeze in this celebration of our past clients’ wedding anniversaries on the blog!
A reminder: Most of our couples have been together for a whopping 5 to 8 years before they get married, so take these anniversary numbers with a grain of salt. We deeply believe that your relationship story and number of years together starts when you begin dating since many of our couples make their huge life decisions throughout their dating time based largely upon their relationship i.e. they come out of college and move in together, get pets together, move to the same city/ state together, etc., so a 5 year anniversary could actually be a 13 year anniversary and obviously many “first wedding anniversaries” are actually a couple’s 9th anniversary together!
For June anniversaries throughout the past 10+ years of us photographing weddings, we’d like to highlight some folks who have moved in to their 10th year married all the way to those who are just now moving into year two of marriage! These weddings specifically ranged from four weddings in the vineyards & desert of California to Chicago suburbs to here in South Bend, Indiana! We’ll share 6 of these June anniversaries with you today.
You may remember them from just last year, but if not Aileen & Ryan just celebrated their ONE year wedding anniversary on June 30th! These two were wed last year on June 30th, 2018 here in South Bend at St. Anthony’s (Catholic Church) at the school that these two met at while literally teaching across the hall from one another! Their reception was at The Woodward downtown, but only after these two adorably had a unique candy cocktail hour with their previous elementary school students at St. Anthony’s! These two start in on year two of marriage this month and we couldn’t be happier for them! We hilariously tend to run into them around South Bend when we’re running errands or hanging out with family and we couldn’t be happier to have so many run-ins with these two!
Next up is Nora and Colby! These two just celebrated their two year wedding anniversary last month on June 24th! Their wedding took place in Park Ridge- a suburb of Chicago, Illinois- on June 24th, 2017! Their ceremony took place at Nora’s former elementary school’s Catholic Church and their reception was at the gorgeous 1906 Park Ridge Country Club. Their reception boasted a wonderful live big band (a nod to Colby’s Louisiana background) and beautiful atmosphere. The next month these two found out that they were pregnant and had their daughter last year in April 2018! They are happily living and working in Chicago still as a wonderful cat, music, mermaid, vegetarian loving little family!
We had actually moved to Michiana a little under 2 years prior to Nora & Colby’s wedding- Jason’s first moves to the Midwest from California and Jenny’s first time living in Indiana in a whopping 11 years (though she’s been photographing weddings in South Bend for 10 years since 2010)! We were very re-established at this point in our business, but had just bought our house in South Bend & adopted our dog about a year prior to their wedding (and adopted our cat a year & a half prior), so we were still re-arranging furniture, buying more items for our studio, consultation office, and editing office while also fulfilling all of our editing, photographing, and printing/ packaging/ shipping of products for our vast array of clients from all over the country!
Californians Ivan & Alex celebrated their 4 Year Wedding Anniversary last month as well on June 20th! These two and their 3 kids celebrated their wedding day in Thousand Oaks, California back on June 20th, 2015. These two had their wedding in a gorgeous park on a classic California beautifully sunny day and even included a huge bounce house for the kids to the far left side of the park! Wonderfully Jason’s twin brother (who was wed just one year prior) and his brother’s wife were both in the bridal party, so we were able to mingle with both of them throughout the day as well and stay with them afterward since we were over an hour from our home of Santa Barbara. The ceremony was beautiful (as Alex was walked up the aisle by their 3 children) as was the following reception! We absolutely loved that being hispanic these two had an amazing taco stand serving fresh tacos of your choice as well as a margarita station. These two actually gifted us a wooden sign that they made for their wedding and it hangs proudly in our kitchen to this day here in Indiana!
At this point in our career/ lives we only had 2 months left living in Santa Barbara, California before moving across the country to Michiana! Jenny was preparing for her July photography fine art solo show (The Visual Indoctrination of the Bigot with mixed media pieces that one could touch & interact with) as well as finishing up writing her thesis book, preparing her power point for her live thesis Defense, prepping marketing materials, posters, post cards, business cards, etc for the show, & having Jason help put together her book design layout before having 3 copies of the published book printed for the school. We were also wrapping up work and attempting to prep for moving our lives across the country while also collecting and paying bills for our 4 roommates (2 apiece), so needless to say it was one of the most stressful summers of life!
Also Californians, Michelle and Marcelles celebrated their 4 Year Wedding Anniversary (of their wedding day) last month as well on June 6th! These two were wed in Santa Clarita, California on June 6th, 2015, though they had earlier officially tied the knot 8 months prior on September 26th, 2014 (so really they’re coming up on their 5 year anniversary in just 2 short months!). Jason knows Michelle from high school in the desert (Lancaster) and Marcelles actually got his Photography BFA degree at the same Santa Barbara school that we got our 3rd degrees at (Photography MFA & BFA), so we actually knew and were friends with many of the attendees making it an especially fun day! It took us about an hour and a half to drive down from Santa Barbara to photograph their wedding which was pretty standard of most weddings we photographed in California (it being such a huge state).
Michelle & Marcelles’ Blue Star Ranch wedding was lovely with succulents, beautiful rolling grassy hills steps away, and a cool corral dance floor lit by beautiful strands of lights. These two also happened to have a fresh taco stand making tacos of guests’ choices, so we were in heaven. Michelle sweetly serenaded Marcelles on her guitar near the end of the night ending a wonderful wedding day. These two later bought a house and now enjoy desert life in their home with Michelle having just finished up her college degree! They enjoy working on their house full on with power tools building fences, frames, and more and are loving life.
Continuing backward, we’re celebrating Rachel & Jason’s 6th Wedding Anniversary as they head into their 7th year of marriage this month! These two were wed on June 22, 2013 up in Santa Ynez, CA at the Sunstone Winery Villa only about 45 minutes north of where we lived in Santa Barbara. We also have gorgeous rolling vineyards up across the border from us in Michigan (about 30 minutes from us here in Indiana), so we’re huge suckers for gorgeous vineyards and obviously Santa Ynez does not disappoint (as their wedding venue was actually a spot visited by the characters in the movie Sideways)! Rachel & Jason also paid us to photograph them for the 2 days leading up to their wedding and their brunch the morning after their wedding, so needless to say we’re thankful to have gotten to photograph days of their wedding festivities 6 years ago as of June 22nd! Not only did their festivities include the villa, but throughout the 4 days they also took their guests to the infamous city of Los Olivos for wine tastings, the Ranch and Reata Roadhouse, and played bocce at the villa! Happy Year 7 of wedded bliss, you two!
At this time in summer 2013 we were finishing up our first year of our 3rd educational degrees (MFA & BFA in Photography) at our school in Santa Barbara at the time. We only had one more year of classes left before finishing those up in August 2014, but getting out and photographing real weddings for normal people kept us grounded in reality (outside of oddly specific completely unrelated intense photography school shoots, fine art, reading textbooks, working at studios, and writing papers).
Our final couple for this June wedding anniversary celebration is a 9th wedding anniversary of another couple in California: Jaycee & Richard. Their wedding took place on June 12th, 2010 up in Fresno, California (an over 3 hour drive for us). Richard was a coworker of Jason’s as well as a friend from high school, so it was a clear choice for them to reach out to Jason for wedding photography needs! These two were finishing up their college degrees at CSU Fresno, but decided to make things official just before graduation. These two had a small ceremony at a church that they attended in Fresno, California with again Jason’s twin brother & his twin brother’s wife were there as guests in attendance. It’s hard to believe that this was 9 years ago with all of the changes that have gone on in all of our lives over the past decade.
We hope you enjoyed these flashbacks! If you’ve been following along for the past 10 years (or past 4 years of blogs) you’ll probably recognize these couples from our weekly blog posts sharing these wonderful weddings, but we did want to step back and wish all of these wonderful couples a belated Happy June Wedding Anniversary!! We hope the years have treated you all well and that you’ve enjoyed the transition into this your next year of marriage!
___________Unrelated: Tomorrow we photograph our couple Mollie & Bobby here in South Bend whose wedding is coming up in just a couple months near the end of September! Their Engagement Session takes place in nature and will include their pet as well as a cool nod to their careers! Check in next Weekly Wednesday for those very unique and fun Teasers from their Session! We are currently working on wrapping up edits of another full wedding & Engagement Session this week, so once we wrap these up hopefully ASAP we then move into creating 12 couples’ worth of printed photos, physical wedding album designs, etc. as these couples hopefully finish up their choices this month or within August!