Kenison-Smally : A Rustic, Country Wedding

It’s amazing how complicated life gets sometimes.  It seems so wonderfully simple when people see you in the grocery store, they say hello, smile at your kids, you both agree the summer is going to quickly and the kids are growing so fast, and you move on… but when you own a business, things are never quite a simple as they seem.  LOL!

Case in point:  I had been talking back and forth with a bride, answering questions about wedding pricing and she had told me I would be the photographer for their wedding.  She was excited and so was I.  A few weeks later, I get a call from a wonderful family friend, Jordan…

Jordan is a girl I took senior portraits for back when I was just getting started doing photography full-time.  She loved her photos, we ended up doing a “cousins” family photoshoot, then I photographed one of those cousins the next year for her senior portraits as well.  After all that, I asked this same gal to babysit my oldest son for me when he was born (I was pregnant when she was graduating and she seemed so genuinely excited and interested I knew I could trust her with my new precious baby boy.)  She was beyond amazing.  She brought him back to her mom & dad’s house and was never impatient to get him back to me even though I worried he must be getting in the way of her social life.  She didn’t feel that way at all, in fact, her and her mom took him all over the place to eat out for lunch with the rest of their extended family, go on little shopping trips and all sorts of other interesting adventures.  He (and I) inadvertently became “adopted” members of their extended family and we often celebrated birthdays, holidays and just regular old Sunday afternoons with them.  I also ended up photographing her older sister’s son’s newborn portraits a few years back.  Needless to say, we are all very close.

… back to the phone call…

she’s asking me about wedding photography and the date has not been set, but she’s thinking about the same date as the other bride I’ve been talking to and who “unofficially” has booked me (AKA: no deposit has been given or contract signed).  I beg her to pick one of the other dates but she warns me it’s pretty likely this will be the date because it also happens to be her parent’s anniversary!  How can I argue with that?!

{It also just so happens to have another element of ginormous significance… it’s my BIRTHDAY!!! 😉 Hahaa!}

… When it all was said and done, that was the date, June 25th, so I had to debate whether or not I risk upsetting the other bride, possibly ruining my reputation and delicately retract my commitment to photograph her wedding, or risk missing one of the most exciting moments in one of my friend Jordan’s life…  Oh, decisions!

Obviously, I knew I couldn’t miss out on Jordan’s wedding, even if I wasn’t photographing it.  So, I picked up the phone and gave the unlucky bride a call.  She was so amazingly gracious and I was so full of gratitude and relief that she still had plenty of time to find another photographer and not to worry.  Happy dance time!

Fast forward to Engagement Pictures… which you can find HERE.

And now it’s time to share some from the BIG DAY!!!  It was the most beautiful, rustic country wedding.  Set at her parent’s home with all her closest family and friends in attendance.  It was a nail-biter though!  There was predictions of lots of rain but we only ended up with LOTS of wind, and no rain until later that night around 10pm when everyone was safely under the tent and a little too tipsy to care that their feet were getting all wet.

The wind did make portraits quite challenging.  Think wispy hair and ties flying sideways… yeah… not cool.  I just had to let go of some of the ideas I had to take pictures in other parts of the yard and stick to an area behind a couple of sheds to keep my subjects from looking like they were about to be swept away.  But even with all that, we have a TON of amazing images to choose from for Jordan’s wedding album which I’m excited to start designing soon.

Don’t miss noticing the amazing bridal party flowers that were created by Flowers By Bree.  She is a local, Kensett, IA florist that works out of her home and she has a God-given gift for coordinating colors and textures with flowers in the most amazing ways.  She can take any bride’s vision/request and bring it into a spectacularly beautiful reality.  (Was that enough adjectives for you???  Seriously, she is THAT good!)

Enjoy!
Becca