How's the weather?

It is a beautiful day in our beloved city of NOLA.  Sunny, not a cloud in sight, low humidity and highs in the lower 70's.  It's hard for anyone to be in a bad mood when Mother Nature struts her stuff like she's doing today.  This got me to thinking about wedding day weather.  I've done hundreds of weddings, so the statistical probability for there to be beautiful weather at each one is pretty low.

Indeed, I've married couples in the best of situations and the worst.  One of the funniest memories was the wedding of a couple who got married in Tropical Storm Lee.  Literally IN it, as it was an outdoor wedding.  One of the lines in the ceremony was "Now you will feel no rain..."  Everyone cracked up!

The point is that life, like the weather, is unpredictable.  Couples spend months, sometimes years,  planning their weddings.  It's a tough pill to swallow that regardless of the best planning, we can't control the weather.  Especially if you have your heart set on an outdoor wedding, you're at the mercy of Mother Nature.  Like in life, all you can do is hope for the best and make contingency plans (as well as possible) for the worst.

The thing to remember is that even if all your plans fall apart - the flowers wilt, the cake gets dropped, stormy weather forces you indoors - at the end of the day you're married.  As unfortunate as those things may be, the point of the day is not ruined.  It's important to keep your focus on what's important...and that's a good thing to remember on your wedding day as well as throughout your marriage.

People ask me all the time how I can continue to do wedding photography and not get bored, fed up, jaded, etc.  It's true - even when I knew I wanted to do photography, I never thought I wanted to do wedding photography.  The truth is, I'm cut out for this.  I'm not jaded and I don't sense that on the horizon.  Weddings are the ultimate expression of hope to me.  They symbolize a decision by two people to say, "You know what?  Life is not always easy.  There are good times and bad times for everyone.  But we are choosing to walk through this world together as a team.  Through all the ups and downs, my life will be better with you by my side."

It would be easy to get depressed if you focused on all that can go wrong or all that is going wrong.  If we concentrated only on the divorce rate in this country, no one would ever get married.  But that decision to love and be loved, to stand together despite the risks, odds, whatever, flies in the face of all the nay-sayers.  It says to me that we are still full of hope.  That's a beautiful thing...regardless of the weather.

My wish for all of you is that your lives are filled with more beautiful days than stormy ones.  That you will enjoy the good days and be a shelter for each other in the bad ones.  And if your wedding day weather is less than what you'd hoped for, may you find the humor in it and may it show you that your union has what it takes to make it through whatever weather your life brings.

In the meantime, enjoy this beautiful day!