05/02/2026
I have been writing this in my head for months, yet still now that it’s time to actually put the theoretical pen to paper, I find myself at a loss for words. I will spare the suspense for anyone who doesn’t wish to travel on this wordy journey with me:
2026 will be my last year photographing weddings.
(*Fear not, I am still doing portraits! Just not weddings.)
Many of my clients already know this, but I have hesitated to make the announcement official. This was not a decision I came to lightly; it took a lot of introspection to get here. 2026 will be my 18th year photographing weddings, and this will date me, but that’s very literally half of my life. When I was doing that calculation, I had to count it out three times to make sure it really was 18 years, because it simply doesn’t seem possible.
I photographed my first wedding as a second shooter in 2009. I was photographing them on my own under the name of High Contrast Photography by 2010. All it took was one wedding for me to be absolutely certain that it was the industry I was destined to be in. I spent the following years building my brand, my skills, my network. I somehow attended college full time as my business grew exponentially, and then met my now husband when it was nearing its peak. In 2018, my tenth year in the industry, HCP photographed 50 weddings.
In 2020, I had dozens on the books… and then we all know what happened to the wedding industry. Even still, I had no plans to retire anytime soon. My entire identity was being a wedding photographer. My career, my business, felt as if it fit me like a silky glove. Everything in the world could be going wrong, but at a wedding I was in control and at peace. I’m a fair writer, a decent cook, I know a thing or two about wine, but absolutely nothing in my knowledge base compares to how confident I feel in my ability to photograph a wedding.
Why, then, am I choosing to retire?
Rest assured, the decision to take weddings off my books is not the easy route. The easy thing to do would be to continue doing what I know, what I am so comfortable in, what has felt like my entire identity for almost two decades. Instead, I must make the difficult choice to do what is best for my body, my mind, and most importantly for my family. My husband and I welcomed a daughter last year, and I’m sure many of you reading this are intimately aware of how your priorities shift once you have a child.
For this reason, I am shifting my focus away from wedding photography and into event management with a highly lauded venue. This allows me to stay in the industry I know and adore, but protects my peace and allows me to maintain a far healthier work-life balance. This career shift, while certainly a learning curve, feels natural and like home.
In the coming weeks, I will be finding the time to tune up my website, taking off my wedding portfolios and wedding pricing and re-vamping my portrait portfolios and offerings. As mentioned above, HCP isn’t going anywhere: I will still be photographing portraits! Watching my wedding couples expand their families, or capturing the growth of my existing portrait clients, is one of my greatest joys, and I plan to continue to do that as long as I can.
I could never have made it this far without my amazing network of clients. Every referral, every review, every booking, has made HCP what it is today. I cannot imagine what 18-year-old me, 18 years ago, would have said if you told her where she’d be now. That bright eyed girl with a whole future ahead of her was so determined to make HCP her “full time job,” to build up that dream into a reality.
Well, past self: we did it.
