Recently, some dear friends asked me to put together a photo display for their son’s wedding. These were not photos I had taken but were snapshots and school photos of the soon-to-be bride and groom. They were prints pulled from storage boxes, albums, frames, and images sent via cell phone from the mother of the bride who lived out of state. Some were blurry, some were tiny and crooked but they were all cherished memories of the young couple growing up. They enjoyed childhoods miles away from and not knowing one another and most of the snapshots weren’t dated. So it was my job, along with the parents, to guess the approximate age of the subject so each chosen photo correlated in time with the corresponding photo of the partner-to-be. A sort of “joining together” through the years, before the actual joining!
This required hours of choosing, sorting, downloading, taking photos of the photos, bringing them into Photoshop to edit, enhance, sharpen, size, and place each side by side on coordinated colored templates with some extra Photoshop details added for display perfection. Finally, each joined image was printed and inserted into frames to be shipped to the wedding planner.
A lot of tedious work indeed! But I’m a detail-oriented perfectionist and love a project. I’d like to say that the photos were the hit of the wedding but this was no small back yard event! The location and details, not to mention resources put into that extraordinary “day to remember” were absolutely stunning. The best part was that I got to be there, as a guest. There were 4 wedding photographers so they didn’t need me!
The Groom and Bride, together, many years before meeting.