5 YEARS FULL-TIME

WOW, you guys!!! Today marks the end of our FIFTH year as two full-time photographers at The McCartneys Photography. Sure, there were years "on the side" before that. But, we're counting our days and celebrating our anniversaries based on the number of years we've been relying on our photography to support our morning coffee and to fill Parker's puppy bowl & provide him with more than enough toys :) Starting tomorrow, we will officially be in our sixth year of business as a full-time husband-wife photography team and, if we're being honest, that sort of blows our mind. We eat, live, and breathe moments together in this world of entrepreneurship and marriage and life with one source of income and share a passion so strong for capturing love & moments in the lives of others. And the best part? The moments we're invited to photograph fill us with JOY!! They fuel us up. They light us on fire. They make us stop and feel so grateful, all at the same time.

We can't help but feel especially grateful today. Without YOU, none of this would be possible. Without your support, your love, and your passion for creating a legacy for your family through photos, we wouldn't be able to do what we love every single day. And that is so powerful, it completely warms our hearts!! Here we sit this morning, in our at-home office, enjoying our second cup of coffee, listening to our most recent happy tunes playlist with a cute fluffy puppy curled up behind us, and we're sending you the biggest digital hug on the planet!!! THANK YOU for your love and support over the last five years!

Want to know the funny part? This September we'll be toasting to our 5th wedding anniversary. SO, we've actually been taking pictures together for a living longer than we've been married!! Sometimes you just know and that can definitely be said about the two of us, in both love and in business ;)

We'll be spending today celebrating, writing in our dream books, and cheersing with family at "taco night" this evening!! Here's to five more years!  :D

xoxo, Kelsy & Butch

photo of us by the lovely laura ivanova

HEIRLOOM WEDDING ALBUMS

There are about a million reasons why we love when our clients come to us and, when asked how they'd like to remember their wedding day, they say with an album. As we've mentioned before, we are incredibly passionate in our belief that every wedding deserves to live on in the pages of your custom-designed, handmade album! When the guests have all left, the decor has been cleared and that beautiful white tent taken down, it is such a great feeling to be able to hold your wedding album as the representation of your lovely wedding day! While you're enjoying life as Mr & Mrs and your friends & family come over to visit, sharing your album with them brings such a feeling of joy!! Thinking about our couples doing just that makes us smile SO big!!! What an absolute blessing it is to be a part of each moment and to preserve it forever in a photograph. If we've been lucky enough to photograph your wedding and design your wedding album – Thank You!! We hope that you're enjoying it and it makes you smile :)

Love, Kelsy & Butch

2013 YEAR IN REVIEW | WEDDINGS

Wow!! Can you believe it’s already 2014? We most definitely can’t and it will probably be June before we get used to writing the date correctly, but in the meantime we want to look back at everything that 2013 brought our way. This might have been the fastest year of our lives but, speedy or not, 2013 was filled with genuine laughter, moments of growth & learning, and fulfilling relationship-building with our clients. We truly feel so lucky to do what we love and to have the support of our wonderful clients, friends & family!! Without all of you we wouldn't be able to live our passion, and that is something that we are endlessly thankful for. THANK YOU!!! :) As we look back through the beautiful moments and celebrations of love that we had the giant honor of photographing, we can't help but smile at all of the fun, sweet & thoughtful faces on our computer screen! We've had this problem over the last few days as we attempted to pull together a collection of images that represented our 2013, so you can only imagine how much our cheeks hurt! ;) We are blown away by the planning and thought that you all put into your wedding day and sessions with us, and cannot thank you enough for choosing us to be a part of your lives!! Creating heirlooms for families to pass on for generations is something that fills our hearts to the brim!

We cannot wait to see what 2014 holds - personalized wedding celebrations across the Midwest, new faces & couples who we can't wait to connect with & get to know, and continuing to capture sweet families as they grow!! Cheers to a wonderful 2014!

Love | Kelsy & Butch

Stay tuned for two more 2013 posts as we share some of our favorite engagement & portrait sessions soon!

THE IMPORTANCE OF A PHOTOGRAPH

Family, friends and loved ones. They've got to be the meaning of life, because when they go it seems you'd give everything to have them back. Telling stories with friends helps; especially while flipping through photos of your most beloved memories. Lately, we have been viewing our photography in a different way. Pointing our lenses in a slightly different direction. We've always been aware that photographing someone's family was important, but it seems the more we photograph special events with couples who we become so close with, the more we realize how important these photographs are. These words aren't anything ground-breaking, and perhaps it's because we don't really know how to express what we are feeling at the moment with words.

You know those photographs of your parents and grandparents that you hold in your hands every now & then and absolutely adore? That's what we are trying to create. We want to capture a moment within our images that 25 years from now — even 45 years from now — makes you feel something. If our bride & groom's grandchildren are holding the prints that we delivered to them and smiling from ear-to-ear, telling their sisters and cousins how young & beautiful their grandma is… then we've accomplished our goal. That's how much value we place on the moments we see happening at the weddings we photograph.

We recently had the privilege of photographing an amazing event. It was a wedding. Family & friends flew and drove from near and far. Smiles and happy tears were everywhere to be seen, and this particular Saturday in July was absolutely beautiful. The property at which the wedding was held was that of the bride & groom's home, and it was decorated SO beautifully by the incredible Evolutions in Design team here in Wausau, Wisconsin. It was the joining of two beautiful families. We had never witnessed a wedding like this before.

We've only personally known the Hugus family for a short time. Just two weeks before their wedding, they asked us to photograph their celebration. Thankfully, we happened to have that day available! A few conversations over the phone and connecting with them on their wedding day has been the extent of our interaction. But it didn't take long for us to realize how incredible this family is. Words can't quite do justice when describing the affect they have on you — we guess it's that when you are around them, you can truly feel their warmth. And John, who ended his 17 year battle with cancer just a few days ago, had an especially welcoming presence. The smile he gave us, having not even known us for more than a couple weeks, made us feel important and genuinely appreciated on his wedding day. We are so very thankful that we were able to capture the happiness that surrounded John on his & Robin's wedding day. We will remember that day always, and couldn't be more grateful to have been a part of it.

Love | Kelsy & Butch

All images captured on film with Hasselblad 500cm, Contax 645 or Nikon F100 and Fuji 400H + Ilford HP5 film. 

OUR BRAND NEW BRAND!!

This wedding season marks our fifth as a full-time husband and wife team. In late 2008 & early 2009 we decided that this is the world that we were meant to be in, and there wasn't ever going to be a better time to dive in than right then! We sort of just took a leap, and we haven't looked back since!!! Thinking back now, it wasn't even so much a "decision" to be made – there was no question or thought that we wanted to do anything else. We simply followed where our hearts were telling us to go!

Our look has been steadily evolving from the beginning, while always staying true to who were are. Our style is classic, organic, bright & happy, and having a brand that reflected that has always been a priority! Over the last 3 years, we felt a shift in our "look" that was heading even deeper in the direction of classic and organic! The color palette that we've been striving towards in our photos has been increasingly soft, pastel and airy. Part of that is because of our switch back to film as the medium in which we capture our photos, and part is us striving for a particular fine art style that we've completely fallen in love with! It feels like this change has been a year in the making, but we are SO excited to show off our new look!

Searching for an artist to help us bring our ideas to life was a process in and of itself! We wanted our new look to be created as a hand made piece of art, but also reflect our style and compliment the images that we create. When we found Hazel Wonderland we wholeheartedly fell in L-O-V-E!! Meredith is a true artist; she creates her work by illustrating, painting, calligraphy, design and visual composing. We were immediately head-over-heels with her soft watercolor work and beautiful calligraphy style!! With the biggest smiles on our faces, we reached out to Meredith and began working with her early this year, and the process had us sprinting to our computers & phones everytime she had something new for us to look at! What you see above is the final Creative Palette that our brand will be molded around. We have had so much EXCITEMENT to share these past few months that keeping our mouths shut has been SO HARD!!! AHHH!!!! So here you have it! We only felt it right to compliment our fresh coat of paint and new brand with updated wedding & portrait galleries, and even put on our fanciest clothes and smiled at the camera for our favorite photographer, Laura Ivanova! We hope you feel that this look fits us as much as we do!! Please look around and send us a message with your thoughts, we would LOVE to hear from you!!

Love | Kelsy & Butch :D