Our Favorite Wedding Portraits of 2014 | Youngstown Wedding Photographers

2014 was an unprecedented, wonderful, fun, exhausting, fabulous, busy, beautiful year for Menning Photographic! We photographed 41 weddings in 2014. . . 41! When we told people that last year, they quickly did some math in their heads & proclaimed, “But there are only 52 weeks in a year!” We smiled at that & replied that we weren’t shooting 41 weekends out of the year because we had some weekends with two weddings (one Friday & one Saturday), but, yes, 41 weddings was a lot & we were so happy about it. Forty-one weddings meant that we got to share with 41 brides and 41 grooms. The bride & groom portrait session is our favorite part of the wedding day & we absolutely love making art that our couples and their families can enjoy for generations. Awhile back, we were watching CreativeLive as we edited & blogged our way through a weekday and I heard the most poignant statement that I’d ever heard about photographing weddings. Tyler Wirken, a wedding photographer based in Kansas City, said something to this effect (I have to paraphrase or I’ll butcher it), “I don’t take photographs for the bride & groom. I take photographs for their kids and grandkids, for their families. I consider myself to be a family historian who happens to take wedding photos.” Sometimes Josh & I take a step back from the immediate and truly contemplate what we’re doing as we shoot weddings.  We ask ourselves questions like, “Who will look at these photos 10, 20, 30, 70 years down the road?” “What stories will the photos tell to those viewers who may or may not have ever even met the couple in the photo in real life?” “How can we best convey the emotions and beauty of this day so that the bride & groom adore these photos for years AND their family members can somehow, in some small way, get to know the bride & groom’s relationship simply by looking at the photos?”

We love our job. There are aspects of weddings that we absolutely love, but we love people & relationships & love more- so much more– than we love weddings, and that’s why I think wedding photography is for us. Our favorite 2014 bride & groom portraits speak for themselves so I won’t ramble anymore. 🙂

To all of our 2014 brides & grooms: thank you for sharing your weddings with us. We had a wonderful year thanks to you and your families. We sincerely hope that your wedding photographs will enrich your lives for many years!

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