Real Maine Weddings!!! (Cover and Content)

Last fall, Maine's leading wedding photographers were contacted by Real Maine Weddings, a newly-launched yearly publication devoted to discovering and disclosing the newest wedding trends, ideas and images from around the Great State of Maine. The editors of this new magazine, which is put out by the same publishing company behind Bangor METRO (a great glossy monthly covering Bangor north, east and west), were looking for photographs from "unique" weddings held in Maine this past summer. How could I not recommend Erica and Barrett's potato-themed wedding held in Houlton in August? Of course, I also suggested others (so many of the weddings I photograph are original and really encapsulate my couple's passions and personalities) but the spuds won out!

When we returned from Tampa, I was so anxious to get to the mailbox to see the printed magazine, but alas, it was not to be. Turns out our box was so buried in snow that our carrier couldn't deliver. After a quick trip to the post office and a scolding from the postmaster, I am now holding a hot-off-the-presses copy of Real Maine Weddings. The magazine will be on newstands across the state all year. The first edition is out now, and the second edition (which will have the same content but a different cover, will be out in the spring.) And do you wanna guess whose shot will be on that cover the second time around? Mine!

You can see a sneak peek of what that cover (click here for the PDF version) will look like above. It's a shot I took of Jess and Greg at Portland Headlight in September.

And, here and here are the PDFs of the three page spread featuring Erica and Barrett's wedding. This is what it looks like: And finally, the editors of Real Maine Weddings picked five images that exemplified the best of the hundreds they'd received. Each of the shots' styles they compared to a famous painter. Little did I know, I shoot like Edward Hopper paints, or at least that's what they wrote when they selected the idyllic ice cream stand shot from Anya and Oleg's wedding in April. Here is the PDF and here is a screen capture of that page: I appreciate the opportunity to get involved in the editorial content of this publication, as I know it will be an invaluable resource for couples (many of which have been jamming my inbox with inquiries in the past week- keep them coming!) planning their upcoming Maine weddings! And I am so proud of my couples who were featured in Real Maine Wedding's pages. I am blessed to work with brides and grooms who are imaginative to not just follow the trends but to create them! Congratulations to Jess and Greg, Erica and Barrett, and Anya and Oleg!

I also have to give a shoutout to Andree Kehn, a friend and fellow Western Maine photographer who had two of her shots of a Scottish wedding featured in the "Maine Weddings Trends 2008" section of the magazine in a blurb about how hot bagpiping is! And, I must admit I am glad I didn't advertise in the magazine because there is no way any ad I'd have created could have topped the one Andree ran. If you secure a copy of the magazine, check it out on page 21. Love it! There are some really fun and moving stories in the magazine, including one about a bride whose mother passed away just a few weeks following her wedding, making the images her photographer took all the more precocious. This was a theme at the DWF convention, with several of the speakers stressing that it's not just snapshots we photographers are taking, but family legacies we are helping to write. As Greg Gibson, who I'll be working with this summer at the Roots Workshops on Cape Cod, said: "When it's something real and it comes from the heart and you lay it down for them, these moments are something that can't be repeated. It's there forever. It's there for keeps."