These two met online before it was the cool thing to do. In a chat room, 15 years ago they found love (trendsetters, I say) and to celebrate their upcoming nuptials, they grabbed Alexandra Meseke Photography and galavanted around the beautiful town of Rochester, NY. To say it’s beautiful is quite the understatement.
From the photography… Katie and Dan are the kind of people that make you fell better about the world. They have a love for life, that I find is so rare these days. They truly to their cores are humble, caring, kind, and giving people. From our very first email exchange I knew that Michael and I were really going to love photographing Katie and Dan’s wedding, and they hadn’t even booked us yet. I just had a feeling. We didn’t meet in person until the day of their engagement shoot this past July, and they certainly did not disappoint. They were fun-loving, out-going, super sweet, and completely HILARIOUS. The four of us were laughing it up the entire time. But even better, it’s not just that they were great in front of the camera(which they of course claimed they wouldn’t be), it was more that Dan had a wonderful way of showing his love and adoration of Katie even with the cameras there. The way he held her and looked at her, and nuzzled up to her had me squealing like a silly girl the whole shoot.
Neither Katie or Dan live in Rochester, but they knew that Michael and I are dividing our time between there and NYC, and they wanted to put the shoot into my hands, and trusted me to choose the locations that I thought best for their shoot. What a dream!! When a client gives you all the creative freedom you could want for their shoot, and send you an email full of inspirational shots from your own website, you know you’re a perfect match for each other. They gave me a few guidelines, but basically we got to wander around my favorite City of Rochester neighborhoods for an evening, and have a blast doing it. I was even able to find some spots I didn’t know existed. It was a GREAT shoot, and their wedding this fall at the Mansion on Delaware in Buffalo is sure to be a stunner.
From the Groom to be… When we tell people we met online, they invariably say something like, “Oh my sister met someone on eHarmony!” But you have to take it much further back, before Match.com, before Facebook, even before MySpace. For two kids who met arguing about music in an online chatroom in the days of dial-up internet, more than a thousand miles apart in different countries, we’ve come a long way. The odds against a Georgia boy ending up on one knee atop a snowcapped mountain popping the question to a Canadian girl must be astronomical, but when a thing is right you have no choice but to move heaven and earth to make it work. Fifteen years after that first chance encounter, we’ve traveled so many new places together that it only made sense to explore a new town for our engagement shoot. Alexandra Meseke showed us a side of Rochester we never could have seen without someone who was born and raised in the area. Her ability to help us relax and create genuine moments while maintaining attention to all the little details (not to mention her amazing husband Michael scouting locations and turning on a dime when we spotted a beautiful spot!) turned the shoot into a day to remember.
Photography: Alexandra Meseke Photography | Shoot Location: Highland Park | Shoot Location: The Little Theatre | Shoot Location: Rochester Museum & Science Center