Have you ever seen a human being glow? Light up. Turn on. Become more of themselves than they were just the moment before? When Zay is near to Abby, there’s just no other word for it. He glows. Zay is a quiet man by nature, but with Abby by his side, shyness fades into a […]

I’ve held off on sharing this wedding day for far too long. It’s not for lack of excitement. Possibly the opposite. I might have just have too much love for Ally and Clay and their beautiful celebration that it feels way too special to let it go out into the world. And that’s because every […]

What would you do to be with of the love of your life? Would stay up into the wee hours of the night baking cookies with him even though you had assignments due the next day? Would you have your newspaper purposefully delivered to her address just so you had an excuse to see her […]

Here in Northern Virginia, it’s beginning to look a lot like summer. After enduring some bitter cold days in the first month of the year, February seems determined to jump right past any sort of winter finale or spring transition and dip us right into the enveloping warmth of a 78-degree day in early June. […]

I believe that the universe, that big G God, conspires to bring us exactly who and what we need, exactly when we need it. You see it all over Ally and Clay’s story. The pair who met by happenstance at a folk music festival. Who decided to trust fall into the open arms of each […]

Somewhere on the list of The Top Five Things You Should Probably Know About Steph Dee is this: I. freaking. love. surprises. Getting surprised, giving surprises, I don’t care as long as there is some joyful secret involved. As a kid, I knew where my mom hid all of our Christmas presents (in the same […]

SAMMY & VARUN: part ii of iii Let’s go back in time to taste some magic—some Sammy and Varun magic—shall we? It was a Tuesday morning in October of 2016, and we’d just wrapped shooting one unfairly beautiful engagement session in the middle of a perfect Washington D.C. sunrise. As we walked back towards our […]

“I’m off to a date with Donnie!” Jen would joke to her roommates. In reality, she was just headed to work on a group project for their marketing class at Bloomsburg University. Donnie wasn’t single, but Jen had a huge crush and a girl can dream, right? She sure could, because after a year of group […]

Growing up in my little hometown of Nokesville, Virginia was so much more of a blessing than I ever knew or realized. Situated just on the edge of Northern Virginia, quite literally straddling the line of Washington D.C. Suburbia and Rural Virginia Farmland, I knew the best of both worlds. But Nokesville is more than just […]

SAMMY & VARUN: part i of iii A bright, sunny, wonderfully excited email from Sammy first landed in my inbox in October 2015. She and Varun had been engaged for a year already. Sammy was living in Richmond, Virginia, fully entrenched in the vicious cycle of pharmacy school that goes a little something like studystudystudyTEST, studystudystudyTEST. […]