As Minneapolis Wedding Photographers, we deal in love stories – hearing them, shooting them, celebrating them! It’s one of the many things that make our job so awesome and keep us filled up with the good stuff on the regular. And since our kick-ass clients share their love stories with us, we decided it might be time to share our love story with all of you!
Before We Ever Met
Let’s start our love story before we knew each other existed or could even do math. Yep, that’s right – when we were both just little tiny tots – we had our first moment of serendipity. To set the scene – we were both born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, and in our post-toddler years, there was a certain cowboy/cowgirl photo op set up floating around.
Somehow, both our moms thought this was such a good idea. So! Earl and I have identical and adorable kid pictures dressed in the same outfits on the same prop set in the same pose. Seriously. We have photo evidence!
Clearly, I’m rocking a little more sass though 😛
High School Sweethearts
What can we say? We’re a stereotype! Earl and I met when we were just freshmen and sophomores in high school. He was a giant bundle of good cheer and energy – think teenage golden retriever with a basketball eternally attached to his hip. I was a quirky, confident band nerd – think awesome, add in some braces and a camera attached to my hand 🙂
One of my favorite of our love story moments from our early days, even before we were ‘going steady’, is the bunny ears tale. It just about epitomizes why we are each other’s lobsters (Friends reference, yo!) Earl had been having an especially bad day and he was especially grumpy. If you know Earl, you know this is not his usual operating mode – now or back then!
We were sitting across from each other on those awkward high school lunchroom tables with the tulip stools. Earl was being silent and glare-y. I happened to have a set of bunny ears in my backpack, so I sneakily reached across the table and stuck them on his head. He begrudgingly looked up at me in amusement – win! Of course I had a camera at the ready and snapped a shot.
Adulting and Proposals
Earl graduated a year before me and moved to Austin, and I joined him not a year later. We supported each other through tough times and the most joyful times. We both worked at Best Buy, Earl on the up and up and me working feverishly on my Advertising degree from the University of Texas. While it was a stressful period, it was one of our most memorable and character-building – because we always made time for each other, for friends, and for acting a fool 🙂
Then over the summer of 2009, Earl and I went on a trip to Cancun. It was amazing! I’m a water nymph through and through and we both love to bask in the sun. But little did I know that Mr. McCoy had a trick up his sleeve.
One morning, we woke up for sunrise on the beach. I was dedicated to getting some amazing shots of the ocean and sunrise and the sand and all the beauty. Earl was dedicated to popping the question. He’s also not a morning person, which made it all the better. He kept trying to get my attention with the ring in his hand while I was just snapping away at photos. Finally, I turned to him and – AHH! – he proposed!
And that’s not even the half of it. The ring he slipped onto my figure was my own design, one that I shopped up and printed and tucked into his wallet long before. He’d had it made to spec. Then, when we arrived home to Texas, all our family and friends were waiting for us for a surprise engagement party!
Getting Hitched
We had an intimate little wedding on our standing anniversary – February 3rd. It was an epic week of family and friends and fun, all culminating at our wedding in a little stone chapel in the Hill Country with a live string quartet playing us down the aisle.
It even managed to rain – but as we tell our clients, roll with it! We just took it as a sign of good luck and an opportunity to skip through the puddles 🙂
Heading North
Our love story continues!
Earl got his degree in Finance not long after the wedding and I began to shoot weddings and engagement sessions in the Austin area. But not long after his graduation came a job at Best Buy Corporate in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
So it was that in just three weeks, we packed up our entire lives into one U-Haul trailer and took to the road with Earl’s dad and our three pups Neville, Tucker, and Howard (or Howie or Brown Cow or Little Brown).
Starting Over
Though I had a degree in Advertising, I knew my first love was photography. I wanted to shoot weddings and engagements and stories. And to do this, I knew I needed to start my own business. So that’s what I did!
Running a small business has been one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my life. It’s hard! But meeting all the awesome people we get to call our clients and friends made it triple worth it.
So winter after winter (we count years by winters up here) I built my photography company, Penny Photographics, and Earl worked his tail off in the corporate finance sector. Until finally one winter came when I headhunted Earl away from his office job and hired him into Penny Photographics! I’m a shark! Minneapolis Wedding Photographers in full force!
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That was in 2017 – and we’ve never looked back 🙂
Us!
We’re lovers of adventures, of coffee, of pets and pups. We believe in new experiences, and even more so – new experiences together! We have a personal goal of traveling everywhere we can and so far on the list we’ve made: Cancun, Rome, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Germany, France, Prague, Thailand, Peru (Macchu Picchu!), the Colorado Rockies, and soon to be more!
In the future, we hope to be more than Minneapolis Wedding Photographers and telling stories through pictures all over the world. And in a year from now, you might find us traveling the US by camper with our pups, touching every waterfall we see! We hope to meet you out there 😉
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