My Approach
Photography has been a major part of my life for over a decade. Throughout that time, I’ve had the honor of photographing hundreds of humans’ best memories and life events. Weddings are my favorite thing to photograph.
To me, weddings are about so much more than the decor, the outfits, the beautiful scenery, the Instagramability. Believe me, I love an aesthetically beautiful wedding as much as the next girl. And yes, of course, I also love love. And still, for me, weddings are about so much more than the romantic love between two people.
Weddings are incredibly unique and special events (hot take alert!). They are possibly the only time in a person’s life where all of their favorite people are together in one place at the same time. While the romantic love is the most important and the reason for the celebration, surrounding the romance of weddings are so many other types of love: parental, familial, platonic. It’s like the Super Bowl of love.
Photographing weddings for me is also about so much more than the posed photos.
It’s about documenting the human connection, the best parts about life - the people, the relationships, the love - in the form of the moments of your wedding day, big & small, and turning them into memories you’ll cherish for the rest of your life.
My job as your photographer is not to create moments worth photographing. My job is to observe, anticipate & notice moments worth documenting into artistically captured memories.
I started my photography journey in 2012 as a hobbyist known as “the friend who takes photos.” Today, I still feel that remains true. Instead of arranging photoshoots of my friends in nature preserves, today I photograph couples’ Super Bowl of Love with the goal of documenting the moments that only a friend could notice in a way that only an artist can capture.
YOU’VE SEEN ME IN
Let’s go back to the beginning.
Photography has been an important part of my life for the last thirteen years. 13! 1-3! A whole a$$ decade & some change.
It started as a hobby way back in the teenage years when I picked up my mom’s DSLR and began taking photos of every single blade of grass and flower petal in our backyard. Eventually there wasn’t a single blade of grass I hadn’t met, so I moved on to greener pastures: people, neither green nor pasture-y.
I was that girl in high school who would take photos of her friends in fields and upload the 700 photos to Facebook. Cringey as they were, it was a springboard to realizing I loved taking photos of people. I became so energized by being able to capture people and their beauty as I saw them, turn my camera around, and make them stop and say, “....Damn, I look GOOD.”
I spent my high school and college years learning from and being trained by professional photographers, graduated from casual friends-in-fields photoshoots to formal senior portraits and dabbled in families, newborns, headshots, college grads and couples. I quickly became known as ‘the friend who takes photos,’ and I loved it. Except when I created my first photography Instagram account and named it “photogretchy,” with the intention of it being pronounced like phot-ahhg-retchy (clever, right), yet instead everyone started calling me Photo Gretchy. Gross. But now I laugh.
Since I photographed my first wedding in 2018, I’ve been hooked.
I’ve been in complete awe at how many down-to-earth, fun(ny), beautiful inside & out couples I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and photographing around the country since then.
My personality traits
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While I do not yet have one of my own, which is tragic with each passing day, I grew up with them and I now occasionally get the absolute honor of babysitting my parents’ three dogs.
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I am not accepting disses of Skyline Chili at this time. I can’t help it that I was born and raised in Cincinnati and that it is synonymous with Skyline Chili running through my veins. Impatiently waiting for the day they finally expand to Chicago.
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I’m one of those people who acts like I’ve never seen a sunrise or sunset every time I see a sunrise or sunset, which is almost every single day living in a high-rise in Chicago.
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My mission of watching every series of The Real Housewives from season 1 episode 1, despite having an annoying aversion to consuming media from the early 2000s due to the low quality of the video. RHOBH, RHONY, RHOSLC, RHOP, RHOC & RHOD down. Salt Lake City reigns supreme in my eyes though.
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Multiple times a year I’ll buy two tickets to a stand-up comedian’s show 6+ months from now without confirming with my boyfriend or any friends that they’ve ever heard of them or are available with the hopes someone will be available & willing to come along.
My favs are Nikki Glaser, Chelsea Handler, Ali Wong, Nat Bargatze, Tom Segura, Matteo Lane, Chris Distefano, Andrew Santino.
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I will also act like each one of these is my exclusive personality trait drink when on any given day it may be any of the others: buttery chardonnay, an aperol spritz, hard kombucha & cabernet sauvignon
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I do it every chance I get. My song is “Valerie” by Amy Winehouse, because duh, it’s iconic.
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Hot girl walks, mental health walks, yap walks - I love them all. On the Chicago lakefront, and they’re even better.
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On everything.
Senior year of college my best friend and I hosted a ranch party where everyone had to bring a food to dip into the ranch along with a ranch of their choice (bottled or from a restaurant), then she & I anonymized all the ranches and everyone went around and blind taste tested them all and submitted their rankings to determine the greatest ranch dressing in all of Columbus, Ohio.
