What it costs, what's included, and how I work.

About 60% documentary and 40% editorial. The day is mostly observed — the toasts, the tears, the kids running around, the way your dad reacts when he sees you. The editorial 40% is intentional portraits, where I step in and direct. Both halves matter. Pure documentary skips the portraits your parents will frame; pure editorial misses the moments you'll actually want to remember.

Most of my couples say the same thing in the consultation. The honest answer: this is one of the things I'm best at. When we step into portraits, I'll tell you exactly what to do — where to stand, how to hold each other, what to do with your hands. Most couples add an engagement session for this reason — it's the most common à la carte upgrade and the easiest way to warm up to being photographed before the wedding day. By the day itself, the awkwardness is gone.

Collection Two is the most common — ten hours and a 100-image album. It covers a full Brainerd Lakes wedding end-to-end without overshooting. If you're planning a smaller day, Collection Three or Four is the better fit. If you want a second photographer for parallel ceremony coverage, Collection One is built for that. And if the wedding spans a full weekend — common at Brainerd Lakes resorts like Grand View, Madden's, and Cragun's — the Wedding Weekend covers Friday's welcome dinner through Sunday's brunch.

It's a working call (or in-person if you're local) about six weeks out where we map the day around the light, your venue, and your priorities — order of events, portrait timing, family-photo list, where to step away for a quiet ten minutes. For collections with albums, it also covers album scope. The day runs better when nothing on it is a surprise, and the photos are better for it.

Travel is included for any wedding within 200 miles of Brainerd — that covers the full Brainerd Lakes region (Brainerd, Baxter, Crosslake, Pequot Lakes, Nisswa, Aitkin, Whitefish, Gull Lake), the Twin Cities, Duluth, and a wide stretch of western Wisconsin. Beyond 200 miles, travel and lodging are quoted separately. Destination weddings outside the upper Midwest get a custom travel package.

A sneak peek delivered to your phone within 48 hours of the reception. The full gallery within three weeks. No three-month waits, no months of silence.

Two camera bodies on me at all times, plus a backup body in the bag. Multiple lenses, multiple memory cards (every shot is written to two cards simultaneously). Insurance, contracts, and 19 years of contingency planning. The practical answer to "what if something goes wrong" is that almost everything that could go wrong, has — and the photos still came out.

Most Brainerd Lakes receptions happen in dim lodge ballrooms or under string lights outside, and the light shifts every hour. I shoot with fast prime lenses and use off-camera flash when the room calls for it — set up to look like the room, not like a flash photo. The reception transition is one of the harder parts of the day; experience matters here.

Both ends of that scale are flat-priced on this page. The Elopement is built for ceremonies of fewer than 20 guests — courthouse weddings, private lake-property ceremonies, quiet weekday elopements. The Wedding Weekend covers Friday's welcome dinner through Sunday's brunch at Grand View Lodge, Madden's, or Cragun's. Anything that doesn't fit either — a vow renewal, a destination wedding outside the region — reach out and we'll build something around the day you're actually planning.