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Merry Christmas everyone! We hope that you have the most beautiful holidays and we'll see you on the other side. 

(these photos are of Glasgow last year. This year? Not so pretty.) 

Dreams {personal}

We don't often share anything too personal here but 2011 has been kind of huge for us and it would have felt wrong to end the year without acknowledging that. As some of you might know, at the end of 2010 we had twins (girls, non identical, 5lb8 and 6lb1). And then we proceeded to shoot more weddings than we've ever shot in a single year. We also decided that apart from the weekends when we had weddings we would do it without any additional childcare. I know, crazy.

"I don't know how you made it work" is something that we've heard over and over, from friends, from clients, from other photographers who want to have babies but are scared of what it will do to their business. And the truth is, I don't know either, I just know that with routines that we clung to desperately like life rafts, the supreme kindness of friends and family when we had weddings and blind faith that it would be okay in the end, we did. And that it's been alternately unimaginably hard and unimaginably wonderful.

The thing is that when we started the business and we started working together back in 2008 this was the goal, to be able to have a family and to spend time with that family every day. To share work and parenting equally, for neither of us to have to work full time or to parent single-handedly. There have been times when it really hasn't worked out like that; months over the summer when one of us (Cara) was chained to the desk and the other (Nye) paced the park day in day out with two crying babies and the world's biggest double buggy. Months where we slept in shifts, handing the babies over groggily at 6am and again at midday, and in those months weddings took on a whole new spin: the only time that we got to spend together not being parents. It has been a huge period of readjustment, of figuring out how to make it work, of making mistakes and trying really hard to learn from them. But you have to pay a price for living your dream and that has been ours.

Dreams aren't a walk in the park (except when they are. In the rain. With the world's biggest double buggy) but my goodness, are they worth it.

Amy & Mark {the wedding}

 
It was a pretty typical Scottish November day when we scurried through the door of Glasgow Art Club, soggy, dishevelled and absolutely freezing. We were greeted by a slightly anxious Mark who welcomed into what was going to be a warm, welcoming wedding, full of love and laughter.
One by one the guests arrived and made themselves cosy to celebrate the marriage of what can only be described as an indecently gorgeous (not to mention kind, friendly and hilarious) couple. Gathered together in the front room, under the watchful eyes of Glasgow Art Club's founding members, Amy and Mark exchanged vows in a touching Humanist Ceremony. Together with their friends and family they celebrated into the night and we left, turning to each other and agreeing that we couldn't have ended another year with a better wedding. 

venue: Glasgow Art Clubband: Devilleflowers: I Heart Flowers