Heather and Scott

I was always taught not to stare at people. If you’ve ever been a kid before, you know that curbing this instinct doesn’t really come naturally.

I guess that’s because when you’re a brand new person, you want to turn and crane and stretch to see anything that might be another clue, another piece to this big puzzle of a world we’d been tossed into.

I think it’s great that part of my job is staring, well, not creepoid staring, maybe you could call it searching out a face. You see, everybody has these little trademark things they do with their lips, or their eyelashes, or their eyebrows, or whatever. Everybody, but some more than others.

And it’s these little unconscious ways that a face moves that defines us, and they are preamble or a punctuation to what’s said. And If I can find that little trademark of yours and take a picture of it, that photo will be real one.

For Heather, it was her wide, luminous eyes. They’re so perfectly put together, I was actually afraid people would think, as I was photographing her, that I over-photoshopped them or something. But they really look that way in person, wide and ready to take in anything.

That was just the way she and Scott were on their wedding day, innocent and kind and wide-eyed, gliding impossibly high, staring far into the rest of their lives from the clouds.