Some days just have a feeling. This song captured it. Play it while you scroll.
Some weddings you photograph and you leave having done good work. This one I left having witnessed something, and there is a difference between those two experiences that is hard to explain but very easy to feel when you are standing in the middle of it with a camera.
The day started at our friend Dea's house, where Emily got ready surrounded by her people, and then we headed out to find a first look location in what Texas generously calls woods. They are beautiful in their own right, all dry and golden and ancient-looking, and we found the most perfect old tree with shade spreading out underneath it like it had been waiting for exactly this purpose. Getting there required me to walk directly into a cactus, which embedded approximately one thousand needles into my thigh, and I would like the record to show that I kept shooting. Professionalism!
Anyway...
The first look under that tree was one of those moments where you hold very still and trust your camera and try not to make any noise.
How did you two meet?
"I was moving to the UK to go to an apologetics school," Emily told me, and then laughed, because that sentence is where the story begins and also where it immediately falls apart in the best possible way. Covid closed the borders. The UK became unreachable. And Emily, holding a word from the Lord that she shared was "go east to go west," looked at a map and landed on Hawaii, the farthest east she could travel with open borders. She planned to work a coffee farm for a few months before making her way slowly toward Asia and eventually Europe.
What she did not plan was Franklin.
Her mom, in that particular way that moms on Facebook operate, discovered that her college roommate from Baylor, forty years prior, had a son living on the SAME ISLAND as Emily. Emily and Franklin got connected, they met briefly, and then a week later "meeting for lunch" became a ten-hour day that included swimming in the ocean in their clothes, finding an underwater cave, driving up a mountain, and going to Walmart, because Hawaii is a movie and apparently so is their love story.
What did Hawaii do to you spiritually?
This is the part of Emily's story I keep coming back to, because she went looking for answers and the Lord gave her something better.
"I thought I needed answers. I thought I needed apologetics school. And He knew that what I needed was just to work the earth, to get dirt under my fingernails." The coffee farm became the place where something in her that had gone brittle came back to life, and she says it this way, which I am not going to paraphrase because it does not need my help: "As I tended the soil of the earth, He tended the soil of my heart."
She calls it her favorite job she has ever done. Having watched what it produced in her, I believe it.
Back at Dea and Dave's house, Emily and Franklin had done something I had never seen at a wedding before. Every single guest received a handwritten letter from them. It was personal and intentional, and the letters were displayed on a wall before the ceremony in this gorgeous installation that stopped people in their tracks when they walked in. The portrait I have of Emily and Franklin standing in front of that wall is one of my favorite frames from the entire day. It is such a clear picture of who they are. They are people who do not let a moment pass without making sure the people in it know they are loved.
Why did you choose to do a first look?
"I was so nervous about the wedding part, not necessarily the marriage part, but the walking down the aisle in front of everybody," Emily said, which is one of the more honest things a bride has ever told me and I appreciated it deeply. The first look gave her a quiet moment with Franklin before standing in front of everyone, and she was generous enough to say that I made it feel safe and fun, which I will accept with gratitude and also confirm that they were both adorably nervous and it was so very sweet.
The ceremony was everything. People raised their hands in worship, babies were welcome and made their presence known in the way babies do at weddings, and the whole backyard had this quality of people who had genuinely shown up to honor something rather than just attend something.
Emily and Franklin had wanted two things from the ceremony: for people to feel tangibly loved regardless of where they were in their faith, and for anyone who had been married for a long time to fall in love again a little. Based on what I watched from behind my camera, both things happened.
What were you hoping people would carry home from the day?
"It wasn't just about us getting married. It felt more like a gathering of story, a collision of stories, something sacred." Emily wrote every guest a letter partly as gratitude and partly, she admits, as something cathartic for herself, a way of processing the changing of a season. Letting go of being single, she says, was not hard exactly, but the journey to getting there had felt raw, and honoring everyone who had walked any part of it with her was how she held all of it at once.
The whole day and reception was homegrown in the very best sense of that word. Our friend Niki did the girl's hair and make-up. Our other friend Bri did the flowers. Their friend Kiki made the tacos, which by every account were extraordinary (I had several), though Emily admits she was too nervous to actually remember what her's tasted like. The music came from a Spotify playlist. Our friend Dave was emcee. And another friend, Amy, served as what Emily calls "a guardian, moving us from person to person through the yard" tapping Emily on the back when it was time to go (which Emily loved because it meant she never had to awkwardly end a conversation herself). The dancing was wonderful and the speeches were beautiful and intentional. And the best one, sharp and funny and genuinely moving, was delivered by Franklin's brother, and I have the photos to prove it. Everyone cried and laughed. He was absolutely magnificent.
Later, after the dancing and the speeches and the tacos, Dea and Dave's backyard held one final scene. They have this enormous tree out back, and for the wedding it had been strung with warm lights and lengths of sheer fabric that caught the breeze and made the whole space feel like something out of a dream. Emily and Franklin stood under it together in the quiet after the noise, just the two of them, and I stepped back and let the tree, the light, and their love do most of the work. We made one final frame in the dark, and Emily says she will never forget that moment, and neither will I.
Fire restrictions in Texas meant no sparklers for the send-off, so they did flashlights instead, and it was so genuinely joyful that I barely noticed the difference.
can you share a three year check-in with us? How's marriage been?
"Our marriage has been even better and it really does get sweeter and sweeter. The person I was on that day is a lot different now. I feel like I've grown up so much and gotten younger at the same time. I feel more confident and less sure all at the same time. Through culture shock and transitions and changing countries and having babies, our marriage has been a haven where we've really grown up together."
Getting to photograph a wedding is always a privilege. Getting to hear three years later that a union only got sweeter is so special. It's the kind of thing that reminds you why you show up with a camera and stay until the sun goes down and walk into a cactus if you have to.
Emily and Franklin, thank you for letting me hold this day for you. I cannot wait to see what the next decades look like.
