Not to photograph anything — I couldn't. They didn't work. I just loved the weight of them in my hands, the way the viewfinder framed the world into something still and considered. I didn't know then what I know now: that I was already practicing the thing I'd spend my life doing.

When I wasn't carrying around old cameras, I was at my grandparents' house, sitting on the floor with boxes of photographs spread around me. I'd go through them slowly, over and over. Some images gave me a feeling I couldn't name — a pull toward a moment I'd never lived, a longing to step inside it. To hear what it sounded like. To smell the air. To feel whatever the people in that photo were feeling in that exact second.

Twelve years and countless weddings later — in New York, in Albania, in Ireland, in Italy, across Europe and back — I understand something most people don't realize until after they see their gallery: the photos that move you and the photos that stop you don't come from the same place.

The candid moment — your father's face, the way someone laughs and doesn't know you're there — that comes from presence. From patience. From knowing when to disappear.

The image that looks like it belongs in a magazine? That one doesn't happen by accident. It comes from experience, from vision, from knowing how light moves at a particular hour, how a location needs to be scouted, how to guide two people into something that feels effortless precisely because it was planned. I've photographed enough weddings to know what's possible — and to know how to build the conditions for it.

I think about your grandchildren a lot. The ones who will one day sit on a floor somewhere, going through a box — or whatever we keep our images in by then — and land on a photograph of you. I want them to feel what I felt as a little girl: that pull. That longing. That sense that they are looking at something real.

What I bring to your wedding is both. The stillness to witness what's real, and the expertise to craft what's stunning.

Those boxes are why I do this.

That's what I'm trying to give you.