A few parts of the article were especially sweet and I want to thank Kristin McConnell and Katharine Fox Castro for saying such sweet remarks about my work -

Excerpt written by Wendi Winters:
The McConnells’ reception for 250 guests was held under a big white tent at a Stevensville waterfront home. The couple currently lives in Fredericksburg, Va., and is expecting their first child in May. “Natalie’s talent speaks for itself,” said Kristin. “Her pictures beautifully capture every moment of happiness and love. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Natalie’s pictures are worth a thousand and one.” She added: “You can see the emotion in Natalie’s photos. They’re really breathtaking. Not just the photos taken of me, my husband and our family. She caught all the little details at the wedding ceremony and reception. She captured all those special moments. I’ll always be able to remember that day.”

Continued:   “She is the best photographer ever!” said Katharine, an M&T investment banker who now lives in Towson. Her husband is a wine merchant manager in Baltimore County. “All of her pictures are warm and emotive. They seem to capture a deeper feeling on paper. I liked the documentary style that comes through.”

The Castro’s wedding took place at Tabrizi’s Restaurant in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor… “The most important thing that makes her special,” said Katharine, “is her love and enthusiasm for what she does. She cares deeply for each of her clients. We became friends during the wedding and keep in touch.”

Katharine and Kristin’s words made me cry. I’m not going to even try to hide it.  They just got to me! I love knowing that what I do impacts people… I love knowing that I’m responsible for capturing these important days in their lives! Kristin & Katharine, thank you so much for writing such sweet remarks. I feel so blessed, so overwhelmed by your words! I’m sending big hugs your way!

And I also want to congratulate a few of my amazing friends on also winning the Bridal Reader’s Choice Awards – I’ve been able to work and network with a few of the best wedding professionals in Maryland including:

• For Best Hair: Up Do’s for I Do’s, Behind the Veil, and Amie Decker Beauty.
• Best Wedding Cakes: Fiona’s Cakes, SugarBakers Cakes, Sweet Sue’s Bake Shop.
• Best Catering: Ken’s Creative Kitchen, Roundz, and The Main Ingredient.
• Best DJ: Crow Entertainment, Michael K. Music Productions, and Absolute Entertainment.
• Best Florist: Intrigue Design & Decor, Little House of Flowers, and Flower Follies.
• Best Gowns & Tuxedos: Mary’s Bridal, Annapolis Formal & Tuxedos, and Bridals by Elena.
• Best Event Planner: Charlotte Jarrett Events, Wedding Savvy, and Ken Upton at Ken’s Creative Kitchen.
• Best Party Rentals: Rentals to Remember, Absolute Party Rental, Top Hat Party Design.
• Best Rehearsal Dinner Location: Historic Kent Manor Inn, Annapolis Yacht Club, and the Chart House Restaurant.
• Best Wedding Site: Chesapeake Bay Beach Club, the Annapolis Wedding Chapel, and Historic London Town and Gardens.

This year is going to be amazing and I can’t wait to kickoff wedding season! Annapolis is full of incredible wedding professionals and I feel so honored to be listed among a few of the best!

What I really love about Candice and Eric is their genuine happiness and warm personalities! It didn’t matter that it was a bit chilly on this January afternoon because they were so truly happy to be spending the day together, walking around Annapolis, and thinking about all of their big plans ahead! Even in just the short amount of time that we spent together, I can honestly say that they put a smile on my face and I left me even more excited to photograph their wedding this summer!

Candice & Eric are true soul mates! I hope you enjoy this snippet of their engagement session!

We launched the series the week that I turned twenty-one as a way to celebrate my birthday and try something new for our readers. Well, one month turned into two, two into three – and so on – until creating different cocktails of the month became a really fun activity for Krista and I to take part in.

And I’ve got to be honest – I absolutely LOVE creating these cocktails!

I have so much fun pretending to be a mixologist, combining delicious ingredients in the kitchen until it tastes just right. Then creating a way to showcase the drink, photographing it, and sharing it online for all to enjoy!

January’s drink was my personal take on the White Russian, which I’ve lovingly named the Bayside Blizzard. The recipe combines: equal parts Coffee, Kahlua, and Heavy Cream + a dash of Vodka and Godiva Liqueur! Swirled together in a delicious mixture and topped with whipped cream, this cocktail is seriously my favorite one yet! Sounds delicious, right? Well, it is! Be sure to snag the cute recipe card.

As the saying goes – It’s five o’clock somewhere! Cheers!

So what is wedding photojournalism?

Wedding Photojournalism is a photographic style that involves capturing candid, unposed moments throughout a wedding day in the most unobtrusive manner possible. Photojournalistic photographers are visual story-tellers, documentarians of the many moments that compose a wedding day. They capture as best they can without interfering, allowing emotions to occur naturally and capturing events as they unfold.
[To see a more complete definition: Wedding Photojournalism]

My favorite images are often those that occur naturally, such as the image above of Lauren’s mom seeing her daughter as a beautiful bride and the photograph below of Kristin & Patrick getting cheers from visitors of the Naval Academy after their ceremony! These moments tug at my heartstrings, they make me happy, and they reflect the day in such an honest and pure way… It doesn’t get much better than that!

For the majority of the wedding day, I am the little fly on the wall – documenting all of the important events, abundant laughter, and stolen kisses while doing my best to just let things happen – candidly! And in this way, I consider my style to be (predominantly) photojournalistic!

At the same time, however, I am not a strict traditionalist when it comes to adopting a photojournalistic style. I’m more of a quasi-photojournalist. Although I do spend the majority of a wedding day allowing events to unfold, I have this artistic love of constructing the scene for portraits of the bride and groom. Oh and the details, I have a slight obsession with details… but that’s a different post in the making! (A much longer post with dozens of exclamation points and smiley faces!) I enjoy incorporating details into posing as well, having a little more control over background, and my subject’s positioning in regard to the light.

I love to find a gorgeous location, setup my couple in a sun-soaked background, before stepping away to capture the scene. Using a longer lens, I leave the couple with a sweet anecdote or I ask them to think about a special memory and just talk about what they loved most about it – quietly backing away. It only takes a couple of moments before they are laughing candidly, smiling at one another, and blissfully unaware of my camera off in the distance.

And it is in this way that I aim to capture genuine happiness and love in my photographs. Capturing the connection that two people share, documenting the spark that exists between two soul mates… It’s incredibly fulfilling task.

So by mixing my love for portraiture with my desire to capture life candidly, I’ve developed this very blended style that – I believe – incorporates the best of both worlds! And that’s my slightly longer answer to the famous… “How would you describe your style?” Question! Hah!

I’m excited to announce that Natalie Franke Photography has won a 2012 Bride’s Choice Award!

This marks my third year in a row winning a Bride’s Choice Award (2010, 2011, 2012) and is the perfect way to kick-start the quickly approaching wedding season! I have been blessed to have worked with so many incredible couples and am grateful for each and every one of them!

To All my Couples: Thank you for leaving so many heartfelt reviews, thank you for supporting me, and thank you for hiring me to document these moments in your lives. Your love stories inspire me, your weddings captivate me, and your kind words keep me going each and every year. You’re the best.

I’m also incredibly excited to announce that I was nominated and selected as a Stiletto Woman in Business Award Finalist for Young Entrepreneur of the Year AND Photography Business of the Year! Out of 300 submissions, I feel BEYOND blessed to be listed with so many other incredible women including Me Ra Koh and Keri Doolittle – who women who have inspired me in my own photography career! You can view all of the amazing finalists here, SWIBA Finalists.

Stiletto Woman is focussed on empowering women in business and through the SWIBA Awards aims to honor women in solo and micro business across the nation. Founded by Karlena Wallace in 2009, the Stiletto Brand has become a marker for mentoring, coaching, and supporting women in business for the past three years!

I’m so humbled and honored by all of this! Thank you so much for believing in me and giving me the little push that I needed heading into the New Year!

Even More News to Come: As a few of you heard earlier this week, I have one more exciting announcement on the way next month! It’s something I thought was a long-shot, but now will be coming true! I promise to let everyone know as soon as I can!

Today’s blog post questions why we, as photographers, are so quick to allow our images to live on the computer. It’s about the importance of bringing our memories to life in a tangible way. I’m one of the guilty ones, who stores all of my personal photographs in a folder on my desktop, who posts them to Facebook, sends them in emails, but never gets around to printing them.

It’s impossible to deny the fact that we live in a digital world. From the moment I wake up until I fall asleep, I’m attached to some sort of visually electronic device – regardless of whether we think about it or not, we are absolutely glued to our smart phones and computers. And between sharing images on social media sites, online viewing galleries, Instagram, you name it – our images spend the majority of their time behind the computer screen.

So we must ask ourselves… Why do we no longer print our cherished photographs?

I’ve always thought of professional photography as a piece of art, not simply a snapshot, not merely an image. A photograph that captures a moment, that preserves a feeling or emotion, should never be diminished to existing solely on a computer screen. A piece of art, as significant as a photograph, deserves to be printed… it deserves to be passed around the coffee-table or hung on a wall for all to see. It deserves to exist in the three dimensional world, separate from virtual reality. Photographs deserve a physical place in our lives.

I remember reading a post by Mary Kate McKenna about how “The Cobblers kids have no shoes” and I’ve always thought it was funny how, “The photographer has no photographs of herself and her family.” – Maybe it’s because we’re often the ones behind the camera, capturing special moments for others… Maybe it’s because even when we do manage to have photographs taken of ourselves and our loved ones we don’t take the time to print them in personal albums or minimally in 4×6′s to frame around the house.

I have to laugh at the fact that I probably have printed more photographs of my clients as gifts, than I have of my own friends and family. And the very few photographs that clutter my desk and walls are from childhood – in the days of film, when an image needed to be printed to be appreciated.

I would like to believe, at least in some fundamental way, that the importance of printing photographs did not die with the emergence of the digital era. That somehow printing a photograph on canvas gives it more significance. That being able to hold an photograph in my hands means more than clicking through an online gallery…

I’m not trying to belittle the incredible gift that technology and computers offer the modern day photographer… I’m not trying to say that sharing images online is bad or that I’m not in love with having my iPhone image gallery with me 24/7. My goal is simply to encourage photographers, both professional and amateur, to remember that images were never meant to live behind a screen. Photographs should be printed. They should be held and shared on a personal level. Talked about between friends. Enjoyed in a family room.

To print a photograph is to give life to a memory.
Just a sentiment from a child of the digital era… from a photographer trying to change her own ways.

We promised ourselves not to start planning until we returned home for the holidays, so once we did – it was an exciting whirlwind of wedding ideas and inspiration! It all started with choosing the date!

Step One – Choosing Our Wedding Date

Choosing a wedding date wasn’t as easy as we thought it would be. We thought selecting a date would be as easy as 123 - but it’s funny how things never go as we expect!

My own wedding photography schedule made it impossible to get married until at least October 2012, but the Hayes’ property would be undergoing renovations this summer – making the autumn a tough time to put together a wedding. Winter is a tough time to get married outdoors for obvious reasons, and then my sister’s lacrosse schedule made it impossible to select a date through the majority of the spring in 2013. “You can always wait until the fall of 2013,” my mom kept telling me… But neither Huey nor I wanted to wait that long to get married if we didn’t have to. I’ve been ready to marry this boy for a very long time, and after struggling over finding even a single date that fit into both of our family’s busy schedules… I found myself almost in tears. Emotionally drained. Exhausted.

I asked my mom for the very first Saturday in the late-spring once my sister’s lacrosse season was over… And she said, Memorial Day Weekend.

My first gut reaction was to say, NO! There was no way a wedding photographer was going to get married on one of the busiest wedding days of the entire season… but when I looked at my calendar, I got tears in my eyes, as soon as I realized the date.

May 25th 2013. It was my grandmother’s birthday.

A simple coincidence? Maybe. A sign that she is still watching over me? I believe so. My grandmother, who passed away less than a year ago, spent hours talking to me about her wedding over the years. The tiara she got from her father, the 400 person guest-list, and the fact that she married my grandfather right after his graduation from the Naval Academy.

And although she never lived to see her oldest granddaughter get engaged, I feel so much comfort knowing that I will be celebrating her birthday as my wedding anniversary for the rest of my life. I know in my heart, that she wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. And when I walk down the aisle to marry my best friend, she will be there in so many ways… a few of which I’m keeping a secret until my wedding day.

I learned a few important lessons from choosing a date for my wedding day. The first, don’t sweat the small stuff – things will work out the way they are supposed to. The second, have faith.

Step Two: Asking My Leading Ladies

You may have spotted my Will you be my maid of honor? post on Bayside Bride a few days ago! And just incase you missed it – I’m happy to fill you in on how I asked my two leading ladies to take part in the biggest day of my life!

I’m the type of person who cries at weddings. Even when I’ve only met the couple once or twice – It’s an inevitable part of who I am. I care, therefore I cry. And I know that there is a pretty good chance Caroline and Krista might shed a tear or two at the wedding, which is why a personalized handkerchief seemed like a fantastic way to pop the question!

It was simple, sweet, and right to the point! I am so incredibly excited to have my sister Caroline and my Bayside Bride bestie as my maid and matron of honor. Both of these girls have changed my life, shaped me into the person that I am today. I feel so blessed to know that I will have them by my side when I get married. It’s truly the best gift a bride could ask for!

Then, Cupcake Tasting – How sweet it is!

I must admit, trying all the different cupcakes at Kupcakes & Company in Elkridge has been one of my favorite parts of the wedding planning process. I know that Huey would agree with me on this one. Who doesn’t love hand-made confections with flavors like Snickerdoodle and Key Lime?!

Lets just say… After an hour of tasting cupcakes, I think even my sweet tooth was tired! I want to thank Michelle, the owner of Kupcakes & Co, for making tasting so much fun and for letting me run around with my camera! It was an amazing afternoon that I will never forget!

And that’s a wrap for my first few weeks of wedding planning! Being a bride has been an incredibly eye-opening experience for me thus far… I have worked dozens and dozens of weddings – but never planned one. It can be incredibly overwhelming and I would love any advice that you may have.

Tips on being a bride? Getting Married? Planning a wedding? Feel free to share!

So rather than photograph a proposal in Annapolis, we met for their engagement session on the yard and enjoyed a few beautiful hours of 60 degree weather in the beginning of January! (When is it ever 60 degrees in the dead of winter?!) It was a perfect day for a truly amazing couple! I know that many of you will be curious about how Walter did decide to pop the question, so I’ve included the story in Sarah’s words at the very end of this post! It’s so beautifully described that, I’m not going to lie, I started to tear up reading it. I work with so many amazing couples and these two are truly at the top of that list – sweet, genuine, and completely in love!

Congratulations Sarah & Walter! Thank you for spending your day with me!

Sarah’s Story:
“As you know, he was planning a proposal January 7th; however, I was getting suspicious. I told my best friend Sara my suspicions and she ratted me out. Walter then changed his plans and proposed Dec. 15th while we were in Ft. Lauderdale for his best friend’s wedding, and the day before we left for a 6 day caribbean cruise.

I actually set up the proposal in a way….a few days before I was in the middle of law school finals and I was complaining about how we haven’t had quality time. He had just gotten back from a deployment and he came back right in the middle of my finals craze. It was hard to reconnect in that atmosphere. After complaining, Walter said that he was going to take me out for a date night on Dec. 15th – my first night in FL and the first night after I completed my finals. I didn’t think anything of it because I had just been complaining about our awful schedules. He took me out to dinner. We went to steak 954, an ocean-front steakhouse. It was amazing. On our walk home he asked if we could walk down by the water. Although it was windy, it was hard to say no because it was so warm (at least compared to what we’re used to.) We walked onto the sand and he pulled me into a hug and rested his chin on my head (which isn’t hard given the 1 foot height difference). We stared into the ocean and watched the waves for a little while. When we started to leave I tripped (which if you know me this isn’t surprising) and he grabbed my hands to steady me. He kept holding my hands and just looked into my eyes.

He asked me if I loved him, which I thought was an odd question – of course I love him. Then he gave me a long kiss. When he drew back he had something in his hand and he plopped down onto one knee. I think I said, “Oh my god” a million times.  I didn’t think it was really happening. I think I’m still in shock to be honest.

I started crying like crazy and then when I stopped I told him that I was SO convinced it was January when we were going to Annapolis. He said that we were still going to Annapolis, and that he had already booked my favorite photographer – Natalie Franke, for engagement pictures. That made me cry all over again, because he has always been very shy about engagement pictures and it meant a lot that he would go out of his comfort zone just to make me happy. As if that wasn’t enough, he also told me that the past weekend he wasn’t as his dad’s like he sad he was, he was at MY dad’s. He drove 3.5 hours (each way) to ask my Dad’s permission in person. That meant the world to me.”