The Tears of a Wedding Photographer

I’ve been thinking about making my blog more personal. So here is me dipping my toes into the deep end of my tears.   A few months ago I was asked to teach a photography class at South High School,  it was a lot of fun and the students showed a lot of promise. A few of the girls in the class couldn’t understand how I was a wedding photographer and not married, funny right?  ha ha ha ha ha….  (let me say really quickly, that my tears didn’t come out of my singleness, that would be boring).  But, I understand their questions because I believe in displayed love, I look for its expression.  Marriage is a long form commitment of a wonderful union in love, and a wedding is in one way like the trails termites leave in wood..it’s the proof of the infestation of love which leaves us vulnerable, and in another way is this ornate launch pad, a kind of decorated cocoon that opens to new depths of love.  It just isn’t mine yet. But that hasn’t stopped me from photographing my clients with abandon, to put my all into my work – trying to capture love.

Recently some of my old clients have asked me to photograph their baby bumps, families, kids… and I have always done it reluctantly.  It’s not part of my vision for my business, and I thought I wouldn’t be able to deliver quality imagery without the proper belief guiding my eye…but it only makes sense that people keep asking – it’s the natural progression.

So within a week, I got to hang out with a few different families; one with 3 teenagers, one with a toddler and a new born, and lastly one with a 6 month old baby it was during our goodbye that I felt the emotions stirring. And in the car ride home tears defined my emotions and in the days to come words defined my tears.  You see, for me the little baby gives so much purpose and reason to my job. It is working. Family is the butterfly of love. We all have a unique smile and I am familiar with the smile of my clients because I look for it all wedding long…and for weeks while I edit, then to recognize it in the smile of baby…that is a tear defined.

Her name means “hard working/striving” and she has spurred me unto this.  Images of Fatherhood, Motherhood,.. familyhood.  Each photograph a page in a liquid dictionary.  With a great heaviness, I realize that it is this greater thing that God hasn’t added unto my heart. cocoon, sure. But, I want family.

I don’t have kids yet, but my children will be the most photographed children to live because it is my daughters grace I see in every bride and my sons stature I see in every groom.  They are the light that causes me to passionately burn for imagery.  All of this brims at the eve of the birth of my older brother’s first child.  The first in the next generation of Jaja’s.   You are welcomed with so much love, you have changed my nature;  this new chapter in the life of our family will be filled with joy, love, and plenty of photographs.