Every wedding, proposal, and engagement shoot tells a tale. Here are some of the newest.

Sara and Graham

How did a newly minted married couple and I end up at a Dunkin Donuts in Charlestown? I don’t really know. One of my favorite things about wedding Saturdays is that 1) anything can happen, and 2) you just go with it. From our engagement shoot last month, I knew that I was going to enjoy working with Sara and Graham. They didn’t take a bad photo—just look at ’em—and they were also both so quiet I’m starting to think they communicate with each other via telepathy. Theirs was a small wedding, and after Dunks we headed over to a restaurant at the Charlestown Navy Yards, where they met up with their guests for dinner and wedding cake. We finished up with some panoramic stuff against the Boston skyline. Small wedding, big photos.

June 2026: Caroline and Mike

I don’t get as many good ol’ church weddings in this line of work, the kind I grew up watching on TV. Like, one with following ingredients: a church; a minister/pastor/reverend; Jesus/The Lord; Bible verses; the old rugged cross; praying; other stuff. At least 95 percent of the weddings I shoot are officiated by JP’s or best friends who got “ordained” online. The Christian services, since it’s the East Coast, skew Catholic or Orthodox, which is the same … but different. On the June Saturday I worked for Caroline and Mike, the wedding had all the trappings of something I’m sure was once more common around America. People get married everywhere these days—back yards, parks, the same dance floors where they have the reception, the beach—everywhere but churches. We can debate about whether that’s good or bad. Actually you can. You can debate that. I will sit this one out and just take the photos. But I can’t deny that the weddings I shot for Caroline and Mike was a happy affair with prayer, love of all kinds, and the feeling that a higher power was sitting in the first row.

May 2026: Allison & Dan (& Diane)

I’m usually hired by the couple to shoot a wedding, but sometimes my services come as a gift from the parents or a friend of the family. In the case of Allison and Dan, my “client” was Dianne, Allison’s mom, who also happens to be the registrar at my old school. My day job as a school administrator has on more than one occasion gotten me a gig with a teacher or other staff, and I take those even more seriously than the rest.** If you blow it on one of your colleagues’ wedding photos, you may as well just quit your job (and move out of the country). But Allison and her mom are such sweethearts I was able to actually put that out of my mind and focus on the task at hand. Allison was also marrying a really cool guy, so the day was fun all the way around. That said, it was New Hampshire and in late May, so heaven forbid the sun shine or the temperature rise above 55 degrees.

** I’m a full-fledged principal these days, so my time shooting teacher weddings has come to an end. It’s not hard to understand why I can’t shoot these for the women on my staff anymore, but I’m gonna miss those.

September 2025: Kora & Sean

Kora and Sean were originally scheduled for 2024, but they had to push it back for a year. The reason why is their story to tell. I was happy to just move them to the following September. Fortunately, I had the new weekend free, and everything worked out all the way around.

And by that I mean I got my favorite shot of the year. We were doing the post-first-look portraits. I don’t remember whose idea it was. I can’t recall whether I told Kora to grab Sean’s tie and pull him in for a kiss, or whether she just did it. That’s not important. What’s important is that I got the shot, and now, so do they.

August 2025: Hayley & Justin

I’m certain that Hayley could’ve gone to Hollywood or New York and made a go of either. I gathered from the speeches at the ceremony and reception that she wrote plays and scenes for herself and her friends to act in as a little girl, that type of thing. Instead, she’s teaching third grade in an elementary school south of Boston, which is just fine. The world needs more teachers and could maybe do with fewer people chasing fame, fortune, and influence.

But Hayley still had the magic, and it came out during the reception. I knew that she and her bridesmaids were planning a choreographed number to “Dancing Queen” at the reception, but I was not prepared for just how beautiful the real thing turned out to be. I’ve been doing this long enough to tell myself and others that I’ve “seen it all,” but I haven’t seen something so unexpectedly sweet as that dance. I like to tell myself that I’m good enough at photography to convey just how great something is in real life. Here, I didn’t quite make it, but maybe you can get the idea, anyway.

January 2025: Meg & Vinnie

Here’s what’s unfair about being a Gen X wedding photographer in a Millennial/Gen Z wedding world: The kids get to have a lot more fun than I ever did. Younger people are getting married the way they want to, which means that modern American wedding is as likely to feature Luke Skywalker and Lego as much as it is Vera Wang and Williams Sonoma. This was on display at Meg and Vinnie’s wedding, which also happened to take place at last week’s venue, Grove at Briar Barn Inn, in Rowley, Mass. Meg carried a plastic lightsaber, which held a bouquet of crocheted flowers. Each table had some kind of sci-fi/fantasy centerpiece, complete with a Millennium Falcon sign-in book. As a wise man said back in my day, the kids are all right.

January 2025: SherMing & Marco

In the summer of 2019, a young musician named Marco hired me to shoot his latest CD cover at the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain. He brought along some friends—including a delightful young woman named SherMing—to help out. It was a fun shoot, and it was the only time that clients (before or since) had asked me out to beers afterward. Five years later, I heard from Marco again: He and SherMing were getting married in a few months, and they wanted to know if I would be their photographer. Easy answer! Saturday’s wedding started with a traditional Chinese tea ceremony and got even better from there. It was a great way to start the 2025 season. A highlight for me was the simultaneous father-daughter/mother-son dance. For being a musician, Marco didn’t appear to enjoy dancing a whole lot. Fortunately, Mom brought talent and steps to spare.

December 2024: Natalia & John

John met Natalia three years ago when, as a news cameraman, he was part of a team that interviewed her for a story about the war in her native Ukraine. Yesterday, they got married in Wellesley. I can’t think of a sweeter, more hopeful way to bring a a busy and “active” season to a close. The wedding was on the small side: Natalia’s two teenage sons and one of her friends. They held the ceremony at the Unitarian church (nice spot!) and then moved to a restaurant called Smith & Wollensky, which I had never heard of before but turned out to be a great restaurant.

The thing about small weddings and this photographer is that this photographer starts to feel about ten to twenty times bigger in proportion to the rest of the crowd than he’s comfortable being. I basically stood in the corner and shot as needed, keeping the shutter on silent and the flash to a minimum.

Anyway, yesterday’s wedding happened as a direct consequence of Vladimir Putin’s murderous and fortunately incompetently run war in Ukraine. I take some delight in the fact that the war has revealed the bravery and resolve of the Ukrainian people to stand up to aggression; on a smaller scale, on the other side of the ocean, it brought two people together at the altar.

I hope that if he knew about this specific story, Mr. Putin would be supremely annoyed.

December 2024: Lauren & Jacob

Congratulations to Lauren and Jacob! I should mention that yesterday’s proposal shoot took on the air of a spy thriller.

Jacob was about to pop the Q at a park, and I was standing ready behind a tree trunk with my 100-400mm so his fiancee-to-be wouldn’t spot me. Just then, two friendly dogs run up to the couple, Then their friendly, elderly owner decided to amble over and stay awhile and chat the kids up, delaying the proposal.

A snag! A complication! I could practically hear my imaginary “team” in my imaginary earpiece: “All units hold your positions! Dogs in Sector 3-0! Repeat: We’ve got dogs!”

Jacob and Lauren were friendly and polite to the dog guy, because they’re good people. Then, once he and his animals cleared out, Jacob was back in business. A few minutes of inaudible chit-chat later, Down he went. Because Lauren went into the kind of tunnel vision every person enters at times like these, she certainly wasn’t going to notice some other guy off to her right. I slipped out from behind the tree. Jacob proposed. Lauren said yes. All the while I was clicking away.

Anyway, on this shoot, the photo of Jacob on one knee is nice. I do like it! But I like the fourth one best. I love photos of people at their absolute happiest.