husband and wife wedding photography team with their kids in a field at sunset

A LONG EXPLORATION OF OUR NOT SO BRIEF HISTORY

We are a husband and wife team… no, I don't like that expression (overused)… we are both photographers who love the visual arts and who love working together. We love our kids, we love the ocean (although we currently live about as far away from the ocean as you can get), we love music, we love Jesus, and we love photographing people and telling stories through the imagery that we create.

We met in Boston… of all places. Neither of us had ties to the city. No family lived there. We didn’t even know anyone who called Boston their home. Yet four best friends decided to move there during the summer between their Junior and Senior years of college. Three other best friends decided to buy a 25 foot R.V., load up their drums, guitars, amps, sound equipment, and a few changes of clothes… oh, and an original NES game console… and tour the East Coast for the summer, playing rock shows big and small… OK, mostly small. One of the four girls temporarily residing in Boston for the summer happened to be dating one of the three guys living out of an R.V. (hint, that wasn’t us). When the band had a few days off tour near Boston, it only made sense that the two groups would meet up and hang out for a bit. Mark immediately fell in love with the City, having never been there before, and he began to fall in love with Katherine.

Yes, we met in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, right outside of the heart of Boston. We connected instantly, flirted excitedly, engaged in deep conversations, and became fast friends who were more than a little bit interested in becoming more. After arriving back as school a couple of months later, Mark and Katherine got to know one another on a deeper level through long email threads, conversations on AOL Instant Messenger (yes, it was a thing), hours and hours of talking on cell phones that weighed about 5 pounds, and drives back and forth between our respective schools (Miami University in Ohio and Belmont University in Nashville). We met in the summer of 2000, were married 2 years later and have been on the greatest journey of our lives ever since.

Our adventures took us to San Diego, where we were blessed to have shared life for 10+ years with our closest friends (3 of whom were with us that summer in Boston), many trips up and down the West Coast, more touring, and a new discovery… photography. Katherine had grown up with a camera. Her father was always a hobbyist of sorts, and is actually quite talented. Early in our marriage we travelled to a remote part of South Africa with a small group from our church. It was their that we really discovered photography. Neither of us had ever been out of the country, and the ability to tell the story of our experiences there upon our return through the imagery that we captured blew us away. Our lives had been changed by the experiences we had in South Africa and the trajectory of our journey changed with the discovery of the power of imagery.

Mark said goodbye to his bandmates of 10 years and goodbye to life on the road, and decided to go back to school to study photography. We moved all of our earthly possessions into a small, 2 room apartment three hours up highway 101 to the quintessential Southern California town of Santa Barbara. Mark studied Advertising Photography at Brooks Institute and went on to pursue commercial photography upon our move back to San Diego after his schooling was complete. Mark started out shooting mostly architecture, but we were both continually drawn to shooting people. Mark began shooting more and more commercial lifestyle while Katherine began shooting more weddings and family portraits. In the meantime we started a family ourselves.

Six years later, we live in Kansas City, where Mark grew up. We have a 10 year old girl, Iris, a 8 year old boy, Asher, and a little 5-year-old firecraker by the name of Cora. Mark still shoots commercial advertising work (you can view some of that work here), and we both shoot weddings and family portraits together, as well as independently. We book up to 2 weddings on any given day, so you will always work with at least one of us (as well as a second shooter). This site is where you’ll find some of our favorite work over the past couple of years. Honestly we’ve worked together so long and see the world through the viewfinder in such a similar way, it would be hard for us to tell you who shot what.

We believe that documenting your life is of profound importance, and although we have fun with what we do, we also take that responsibility very seriously. We’ve had experiences in our lives that have cemented that importance in our hearts and in our minds, and we’d love to share more on that if you are interested. If not, i hope you enjoyed this verbose exploration of where we’ve come from anyway :)

If you’re interested in working with us, or if you just want to say “hey”, we would absolutely love to hear from you! The best way to get a hold of us is to contact us through the form on our Contact page.