I know I’ve said this before, but we love love. Especially when it’s so joyfully exchanged and contagious as it was between Rachel and Dan on their wedding day. I don’t even know where to begin with Rachel and Dan’s wedding day: beautiful, unique, fun, lots of laughter, rustic, vintage, homey, DIY, fall, horses, motorcycles… the list goes on and yet doesn’t even fully sum up their wedding! Getting to be these two’s wedding photographer was a huge honor, and with them living only 30 minutes from Cottage Grove, Minnesota, I expect that we’ll be back at their house to go horseback riding in the future!

Mark, Mark, Mark… you’re turning thirty today – where has the time gone? I remember that high school boy that I first caught watching me in the tent at Beulah Beach like it was yesterday. He was cute and funny, able to talk but didn’t talk too much, and a complete mystery to me. You’re still mostly a mystery to me even though we’ve liked each other for 13 years, have officially dated for 11 years, and have been married for 8 years. I don’t get how you’re so content to be a servant leader. I don’t get how you love interruptions in your day. I don’t get how you can be so present with a person when you have so much to do. I don’t get how you stay so calm and so loving when I start to spin out of control and allow anxiety to gain ground.

Brennan, Ethan’s best man, stood up in front of Ethan and Kirstin’s wedding guests and explained his first impression of Ethan.


“I thought he was just a classic white Minnesotan boy who didn’t know how to talk to girls.”


After all, when Brennan met Ethan, he learned he was a studying to be an accountant and didn’t find him to be overly talkative or anything, so when he found himself in the middle of having to be on a group date with Ethan – watching a Disney movie and making the girls dinner (a classic Northwestern tradition) – he told Ethan to just let him do the talking.

In the Bible the Israelites often built piles of rocks to symbolize different achievements, milestones, and ways that God had met them, but that’s not really done much today, so when Shauna and Jordan reached out saying they wanted to do a couple portrait session to commemorate the milestone of being married for five years, I was super excited! Anniversary sessions are so precious because they capture the specialness of the stage that you are in and each year looks different. Mark and I try to take on an anniversary session for ourselves each year – although this year it also included the kids…and is still needing to be edited (#busyseason)!

On average, a bridal consultation takes 45 minutes. Sometimes we get through it in 30 minutes, often we take an hour, but never have we sat down with a couple and talked for almost two hours like we did with Rachel and Dan when we all got together. We would have sat and chatted even longer, I’m sure, if it wasn’t for the fact that I needed to get back to feed our little baby girl! We are so excited to be Dan and Rachel’s wedding photographers this week, but we wanted to get a chance to share some of their fun engagement photos that we got to take while exploring the backside of Lebanon Hills Regional Park in Eagan, MN last week.