The Road Not Taken {A little review of 2014}

I wish I knew how to write it all out, how to say everything I want to say, but I felt like I needed a bit of distance between myself and the last year before I even began to think about it.

You see, it was a year of personal loss and professional gain and in a way I feel like that’s always how it goes.  When one thing in your life is going well, something else suffers. 2014 was by far the best year for the biz with getting to shoot so many amazing weddings in so many gorgeous places both near and far, being asked to speak at the Canada Photo Convention, and getting named as one of Rangefinder’s Rising Stars of 2014, but we had a lot of loss in the family. My grandfather passing away being the biggest and it left a deep sorrow that I wasn’t sure quite how to process. I can deal with most any kind of physical pain without skipping a beat (for those that don’t know me so well, I broke a toe in the first hour of shooting a wedding and kept on going right through the other 11 hours), and yet this pain was different.

This last year has had me reliving some of my family moments, through the photos and little notes written on the backs of them. I remember my very teeny grandma telling my brother and I that she was “average height” for her generation and the two of us, who towered over her, laughing. We found some photos fairly recently of my grandma and her group of friends and sure enough, she was the same height as everyone else!

There are few things that I regret, but not taking more photos of my family is by far the biggest. I have so many photos of my family from when I was little, but in the hubbub of life, you forget to take photos of your family as they are now. Sometimes I feel like the builder with a half-finished house. My resolution for 2015, if you can call it that, is to take more photos of my own family, as it grows and changes. To document our lives as I get to document the lives of others.

I’m so very thankful that this job means that I get to do just that, document other people’s lives and tell their stories, viewing some of my family story has made me appreciate it even more. Most, if not all of my favourite images of last year were of family and friends enjoying a moment at their weddings. Candid little morsels of time. I look through the photos and they remind me of the joy, love, nervousness, and care that is this life.

I feel like I’ve written much too much, but my goodness, it felt good to write it. Before sharing some of my favourite photos from the last year, I wanted to share with you a poem by Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken. In the last year, I’ve questioned my path a lot, but this one, right here is where I’m supposed to be.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
~ Robert Frost

I Love Wednesdays at One Fine Day

To say we loved our booth for this year’s One Fine Day would be an understatement. It was a real labour of love and DIY goodness. We basically transported a part of my house to Australian Technology Park and tried to bring love and colour to our booth.

A lot was DIYed in the weeks prior to the fair, including our rug (which is not so secretly my faovourite DIY from this year). But our kind of amazing wall was made by the wonderful guys from WildSets, who built our epic wall, I really wanted it to feel lived in and like you were coming into our backyard and they really nailed the look. It turned out more perfect than I could’ve imagined, and I’m trying to figure out how to put it up in our house!

Thank you to my better half Nick for, as always, keeping me sane and running with my crazy ideas, my biz buddy Vic for making sure things ran smoothly, Jack attack for coming to help set everything up and to everyone else who came and said hello it was so lovely to meet you all and I hope you enjoyed the fair!

xx

One Fine Day

There’s been a lot going on behind the scenes here at I Love Wednesdays and One Fine Day was a lovely little preview of some of the awesomeness that is to come! We used it as a little pre-launch of the new look. I was thinking about waiting for everything to be done before properly launching it, but I cannot describe the excitement I’ve felt and I just had to share it with everyone. This blog post was really supposed to wait as well, but again, EXCITEMENT. I’m like a ball of nervously excited energy and really, I had to share, both about the new look and also the wonderfulness that was One Fine Day.

I’m still not quite sure how to describe the craziness that it was and the booth. For a start, I didn’t realise how many other people loved dinosaurs, and how many people played with them too! Also, the new chalkboard pendant drew a lot of awesome comments and a lot of disbelief that I chalked that bad boy myself, and I have proof!

I absolutely adore colour and warmth so the rest of the booth is designed really around everything that I love. This year, even more than last year, I wanted people to get a sense of what I Love Wednesdays is, how I work, and also a little bit of what I love with my love of cameras, typewriters and dinosaurs. I won’t lie, I was a bit worried about how whether everyone would like the dinosaurs, but who knew that so many people loved dinosaurs?! It was absolutely insanely wonderful pulling everything together with a huge thank you to everyone who helped, especially Justine Rose for putting together my lovely flowers at the last minute and helping out.

Thank you so much to everyone who stopped by, said hello and had a bit of fun. I don’t think I’d ever spoken quite so much in my life and it was wonderful to meet so many gorgeous couples. What I absolutely adored was hearing about so many wedding days and seeing how people were working towards making their day so personalised and meaningful. There’s nothing that I love more than seeing how people’s style, family & history all come together to make their wedding day such a reflection of themselves.

All I have left to say is thank you and enjoy.