Wife and Wife Photography Team

I was going to put up a shoot I had recently done. But today Natalie freakin’ shined and made me realize how lucky I am to be part of a Wife + Wife wedding photography team. A lot of people ask how it works. Who does what? How do you set boundaries? What does Natalie do besides photography? And I want to answer those questions in other posts. But today it’s all about a typical morning that resulted in a genius idea from Natalie.

I woke up to pouring rain and promptly announced, “Today is a perfect editing day!”. Because it is. Gray skies. Nowhere to go. Just dive into my trance like state I get whenever I edit photos. The kind where Natalie has to remind me to eat. Then shove food in front of my face so I eat. So we jumped out of bed and went to the gym together. Which is a biggie since I haven’t been going to the gym very much in the last year since my health crisis. Then we went to Starbucks in downtown New Haven for my soy frap fix (I’m lactose intolerant and gluten free now, oh the fun) plus brainstorming.

I needed serious help. In this team, I tend to be the one with a million billion ideas. I come up with them left and right. Then Natalie or my awesome Studio Manager, Katharine, sit down and force me to make a decision. They draaag it out while I kick and scream. So Starbucks was the moment for Natalie to kick me into making a decision about our ad on A Practical Wedding. It’s our only ad and expensive so we wanted to make it look great. And instead of making a decision and designing it- I had 40 ad ideas to present to Natalie. Ha! So while picking apart why we liked this ad or this ad, Natalie asked why I had included the words “Wife + Wife Team” in some of the ads. I explained I was so proud and felt so lucky about how much my businesses had changed since just this fall and wanted to honor that it just isn’t me anymore. I am part of a team.

And then she burst out with “Pretty. Witty. And Gay.” At first, I thought she was just singing her usual songtunes/movies/anything she likes to belt out. Randomly. Pretty much all the time. But she gave me that look. Woah. She was actually suggesting a…slogan? Mantra? Pun? And that was it. The more I say it, the more I want to plaster a giant poster with it in the studio. I’m starting to love it. And feel it’s just perfect in that weird sorta way.

And not my idea at all. It was Natalie. And that’s team work. And then we did our really weird high five (I need to take a movie of it for our kids to laugh at in 20 years)