Today my husband and I “celebrate” 14 years of marriage! That sounds so long ago! When I say “celebrate,” I mean that we got married 14 years ago.  In reality, I am photographing a newborn session this morning and going to a baby shower this evening, and my husband is at work. Celebrations will have to wait, because, after all, it is Wednesday!

While photographing a 10 year anniversary session last week, it reminded me of my 10 year anniversary (when I was very pregnant with my 3 1/2 year old son), and when I got back home, I pulled out my box of wedding proofs and started perusing the images that I haven’t seen in a while.  My wedding pictures are very different from the way I photograph, and my style.  I still cherish them.  They were taken by a friend of my Grandmother’s cousin, whose name I have sadly forgotten.  He was in fact a professional photographer, but didn’t specialize in weddings.  I still got every picture that I needed, thanks to my very bossy older sister who had gotten married 10 months earlier, and is a Type A personality.  The pictures are pretty formal and taken with film, hence the 5×5″ proofs from his medium format Hasselblad.  The truth is I didn’t do much of the planning for my wedding!  My wonderful Mother took on the planning, and I just agreed with everything she chose, because I was 17 years old, and cared more about being married than getting married!

Now that I am married, with 2 kids, what I have left of my wedding day are some memories (which are sadly fading), but the pictures to remember it by.

To give you some perspective on how you will cherish your pictures 10 or say 14 years down the line, here are two observations I have made:

1.  Everyone, except my Mom, has aged a whole lot more than I remember.  I look at these pictures, and remember people telling me (for years!) how young I looked.  People often told me I looked “so young” given my age until I had my second child.  Something clearly happened after having Tristan, because I no longer got those kinds of “compliments.”  I certainly did not see them as “compliments” when I was so young!  I will gladly accept them now.

I look at the pictures of my husband and me and realize how young we did look.  We were young!  I turned 18 the week before my wedding, my little sister was only 12 years old, my youngest nephew wasn’t born yet, my Great Grandmother was at my wedding, and we have a picture of the 4 generations of Kanzler/Power women!  Not only do we all look a whole lot younger, but my style of dress and shoes looks so dated (and let’s not forget my bangs)!  It makes me feel really old to say that, but it will only become more obvious as time goes by!

2.  I cherish the pictures that didn’t make it into my album.  It may seem a bit redundant to have all your pictures printed and then to also have an album, but it’s not.  Your wedding album is a story about your wedding day, and since it is (hopefully) created shortly after your wedding, it tends to flow in a way that the bride and groom remember the day happening!  We start with getting ready, we move onto pictures of the bridal party, some intimate moments between mother and daughter, father and son, perhaps a first look, the ceremony and reception.  However, your album can only hold so many photos!  There were a lot of people at your wedding (okay, only 13 at mine…) but 14 years later, some of those people aren’t around any more.  Some of those people became even closer friends. Some of them may have had babies at the same time as you!  You will look back at your proofs and cherish them in a whole new light because of the events that took place as you did life.  There are also those memories that you thought you would remember forever, but you don’t.

You’ll see below I took some pictures of my wedding album, the details I found from my wedding (sans the tightly sealed wedding dress), and some proofs that didn’t make it into my wedding album, because I didn’t know how much they would mean to me in the future.  They have a whole new meaning now.

Welcome to the future!