About Aaron
Hi, I am Aaron.
I photograph weddings for people who want the day to feel like theirs, not like a production schedule with flowers.
Where this started
Cal is the first thing I ever photographed with a real camera.
Not a sunset. Not a mountain. A puppy, in a yard, doing nothing.
I had been taking pictures since I was a kid, the way everybody does, without it meaning anything. Then I got Cal, bought a DSLR to photograph him with, and took several hundred frames of a dog who was asleep for most of them. Then I taught myself to edit. On him. Every slider I know how to use, I learned on Cal. He has been colour-corrected more times than most stock photography.
He is eleven now. He has no idea he is the reason for any of this, and he would not care.
The staff
There are two of them.
Cal is eleven. He has been photographed more than any couple I have ever worked with and he has never once been asked to sign a model release.
Sugar is six. She has never been where I asked her to be. Not once. I have stopped asking.
Where everyone is
My family is spread across two countries and I photograph in both halves of it.
My mom lives in Corpus Christi. My dad lives in Waterloo, Ontario. The rest of my family is in Austin. I live in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.
Nobody planned this.
What it means in practice is simple enough. I am here in the DMV most of the year, close to Harpers Ferry, Frederick, DC, Northern Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley. Then every winter I go to Texas, because that is where my family is, and because a beach in February is a considerably better idea than the Blue Ridge in February.
So I take a limited number of Corpus Christi and Austin dates each winter, with travel already included, and announce the windows each September. I am not a year-round Texas studio and I will not pretend to be one.
Two things I am unreasonable about
Animals, and being outside.
I love animals. Not in a mild, general, everybody-likes-dogs way. In a stop-the-car way. It is why I photograph pets, which is not a normal thing for a wedding photographer to offer and which I have no intention of stopping.
So bring your dog to your wedding. Genuinely, bring the dog. It is always the best part of the day and I have never once seen anybody regret it.
The other one is that I would rather be outside than almost anywhere. The overlooks, the rivers, the beaches, a field in the last hour of light. Those places are most of the reason I do this instead of something indoors and sensible, and I would very much like them to still be there in thirty years. That is about as political as I get at a wedding.
How I actually work
The photography should help the day, not hijack it.
I am shy. I also know exactly what I am doing, and those two things are not in tension. On a wedding day the combination mostly works in your favour: I am not going to be another personality in the room, and nobody has to look after me.
I care about timing, light, family-photo sanity, and knowing when to stop talking. Most people do not need more posing. They need enough direction to feel comfortable and enough space to be themselves.
I plan for light and then read what the day is actually doing, because the alternative is turning up with the picture already decided and being disappointed by real weather. Some of my favourite frames came out of conditions nobody asked for.
If it is useful, I have written down the things couples ask me most: how long photographs actually take, what a second location really costs you, and what this costs and why.
This is my life's work.
Not a phase, and not a thing I am doing until something better turns up. I love what I get to do and I would like to keep doing it for a very long time.