2020 wedding highlights
TL;DR: COVID happened. Weddings rescheduled. Some weddings happened. They were great. Watch the slideshow below. :)
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Well, it’s over (sort of, I guess). 2020 was quite the year for everyone. It was the same for myself, my business, and my family.
I started the year on paternity leave with my son, who was born in August 2019. It was a welcome break from my day job, as 2019 was my first full wedding season, which ended with a very busy autumn. A busy wedding season, combined with a physically and mentally demanding day job and two kids under 4, my life was chaotic to say the least.
2020 was meant to be a huge step forward for JSP. I had something like 17 weddings booked. I was very comfortable with that number, given all the other things going on in life. But I was (am) hungry to really make this thing a large part of my life. I was looking forward to having a sleeping baby two to three times a day where I banged out social media content and did some paid advertising to add a couple late 2020 weddings and book a full slate of 2021 weddings. Unfortunately, my kid’s are terrible sleepers and, oh yeah, COVID happened. hah! So I had a baby, and a kid home from daycare, and a wife working from home trying to keep her business going during a pandemic. Nice!
Then the reschedulings started. The advice I gave to my couples was do what feels right. What are the most important aspects of your wedding? And how are they affected if you hold on for a 2020 wedding? Reschedule for 2021 and I will be there. Stay on for 2020,and I will be there while adhering to public health guidelines. I personally would have rescheduled my wedding, as I wanted my wedding to be an epic party (and it was). But I was very empathetic to the difficult decision for all couples planning to get married in 2020, and I felt the pain that the wedding industry was feeling from lost revenue and a pause on the industry as a whole.
About 2/3 of my weddings decided to wait until 2021 to get hitched. I really hope we see the end of this madness soon. There is hope that things will change, slowly but surely. And I definitely hope that weddings return to “normal” sooner than later. With that said, the intimacy of smaller weddings has been incredible. There is most definitely COVID weirdness and disappointment from public health restrictions, but all of my couples were immensely positive, loving, and supported. It was truly beautiful to see sociality and love continue to flourish when the world was/is kinda going to shit around us. The love and emotion I photographed during 2020 really stokes my fires to be a part of these wonderful moments in people’s lives as much as possible. Love, life, and good times endure. Parties and touching may be on hold, but they will be back. And we will all be yearning for human connection.
So cheers to all the wonderful couples and families that I had the pleasure of working with this year. And cheers to all the couples and family who chose me, and will choose me, to be there with them in 2021. // Josh
Enjoy the slideshow. :)
