The sky was yellow. Not “golden sunset” yellow. Wildfire-smoke yellow. The sun had shrunk down to this small red orb, like something out of a movie where the world’s ending. And on top of all that, a rainstorm was rolling in.

Not exactly the idea wedding weather. The bride knew she was not going to get her perfect blue sky day.

At one point during the wedding morning, myself, the bride, and her coordinator all looked out the window and knew we needed to figure out how the rest of the day was going to unfold. My amazing, thoughtful bride said it herself before any of us could dance around it. “The day is going to be apocalyptic, isn’t it?”

The coordinator jumped in fast. “No no, everything’s going to be perfect. It’s going to be beautiful!” Which, fair. She’s incredible at her job.

And me…I’m not trying to celebrate hard things here. Buuuuuut yeah. Kind of. It is a little apocalyptic. SOOO let’s make the most of it.

Because I’m not here to fake any of this. I’m here to enhance it. Overcome it. Roll with the punches.

Here’s the thing I keep thinking about: people have always gotten married in the middle of chaos. Through wars. Through storms. Through blackouts and floods and plagues and years where you can’t believe anyone would get married. But they still do. A wildfire-orange sky on your wedding day isn’t some bad luck. It’s how life goes

So when you sit down twenty, thirty, forty years from now and tell the story of your wedding day, and you get to the part where you say “the sky went yellow, and then this storm just rolled in,” people are going to lean in. They’re going to want to see it in the photos. That detail tells a much more heroic story than “the sky was blue and everything was fine”.

Which is why it never made sense to me that some photographers would rather fake it. They’d swap the sky. Hide the mess. Stage a perfect setting. Smooth the whole day into the same golden-hour fantasy every wedding is “supposed” to look like.

If I do that, your photos aren’t better. They’re generic at best and inauthentic at worst. I’ve taken something that made this day so completely unique, and traded it for something that could belong to any old Pinterest mood board.

In my mind, every mishap is part of the plot

This doesn’t just apply to wildfire smoke and rainstorms. It’s the small stuff too. The dress that needed a safety pin. The lost uncle sauntering into the ceremony 15 minutes late. The flower girl who absolutely refuses to walk down the aisle. Whether it’s a small mishap or big, historic, “why is this happening to us right now” event, it’s all the same category to me. There are no flaws in a wedding day. There are conflicts, resolutions, and moments of triumphant prevailing.

No two weddings will ever have this exact combination again. This couple, this year, this sky, this storm. That specific thing already happened, and it can’t be recreated, staged, or borrowed. I never want to to smooth that over. I want to make sure the photos actually match the story you’re going to be telling for the rest of your life.

We leaned into it. And I’d do it again every time.