What was your favorite moment of your wedding day?: Bride: I had so many favorite parts it’s so hard to choose. Overall, the love and just plain happiness we felt from everyone on the dance floor at the reception stands out to me the most. I couldn’t have pictured a more perfect day.

Groom: My favorite moment of the day was finally being announced as Mr. and Mrs. Mele when we walked into the venue and everyone we love was there cheering us on with genuine happiness their faces.

While Covid this year hit the wedding industry badly, what I hate the most is the extra stress it put on our couples. Planning a wedding can be stressful enough and Zoey & Eli had to postpone their wedding day twice!

Even though they have a big reception planned for mid 2021, they decided to elope, together with their closest friend and family at their parents house and I have to say I am really starting to love these small intimate weddings.

A few months ago I received an email from Rangefinder, saying that I was nominated to submit my images to the 30RisingStars contest.

Most of you might not know what that is. It is a contest that you can only submit if you are nominated by a previous winner of the contest or by Rangefinder itself. A contest that wedding photographers from all around the world strive to be part of. I could hardly believe that I was being nominated. I actually reached out to a few photographers that have won in the past to make sure that the email wasn’t a scam, haha.

When Covid hit in March, most of my couples at the beginning of the year immediately postponed their date. Nobody thought back then that even the ones that were booked for late fall had to consider it as well!

Sunny & Mike’s wedding date was scheduled to be at the beginning of November 2020, but when in August they saw that things with Covid weren’t changing they decided to put their guests safety and health above all and they postponed their big wedding to November 2021.

Planning a wedding is easy task said no one ever… Have you tried planning one in the middle of a pandemic crisis? Just the thought of it gave me chills….. Well, until I shot Kara & Tim’s wedding!

When they first started planning out their big wedding, they never thought that anything like a world spread virus would push them to make big changes! Many times during the planning they felt like they were sacrificing a lot. Changing their date was not an option, so they decided to reduce the guest list and focus on everybody’s safety.

As most of my photographer friends know, we go through multiple phases in our carrier. From excitement and loving our whole shoot, all the way to doubting everything we do.  I believe that part of it is because, as artists we strove for perfection, and while that pushes us to become better at our art, we sometimes lose sight of appreciate the beautiful moments we have captured. This past year I have particularly struggled with this. But a wedding that began as a literal natural disaster, that erased all of the hard planning for their perfect day taught me to seek the beauty in what is in front of us.

I am beyond honored to have one of my images win one of the biggest photography contests in the wedding industry. When I started this career I never considered I would win awards, I just wanted to capture beautiful pictures. While I was growing as an artist I didn’t realize that I was growing as a person too. These are the images I aspire to capture for all of my clients. Images that tell their story, photos that they will look at twenty years from now and recognize themselves and all the special details, photographs that will make them relive every emotion of their special day.

When I met with Kristin & Shawn for their engagement portraits they were really excited and at the same time they were visibly nervous.

Sometimes we are raised with the idea that portraits have to be straight forward, looking at the camera, fake, cheesy smiles. And even though I go over the process with all of my couples, those first 10 minutes sometimes can be intimidating… On the contrary though, Kristin & Shawn got comfortable by spending a relaxing late afternoon at the lake, knowing that they were going to be doing one of their favorite hobbies, spending quality time with each at one of their favorite locations, Smith Mountain Lake.

Here is a little bit about them!
How did you meet?: We met in a class at Virginia Tech. (Go Hokies!) we were in a group for small business management and our other two partners were of NO help. It was just often us two working on it and our relationship grew from there!

Hi, my name is Patrizia Corigliano Giovannini. Most call me Pat for short.

One of the biggest feelings I remember growing up was a being in a constant state of confusion. I grew up in the US, then moved to Italy at the age of 9, then back to the States again as a young adult! I was born in New York to my Italian immigrant parents. My mother & I have a language of our own. It’s a mix of English an Italian dialect from a little town in Calabria, the south of Italy, where both my mother and father are from.

During my early years in the US there was once a class project where everyone had to wear the flag of where they came from. I was wearing the Italian one and most other students were wearing the United States Flag … I didn’t understand why I was different since I was born in the States like everyone else, but my family identified as Italian.

How they met: They were in the same math class in 7th grade , at the young age of eleven! Throughout school years they were only friends , even though they always had a thing for each other . They used to meet up at a local baseball field parking lot and sit in the car and talk for hours and hours. “We were always so open and able to be our genuine selves with one another” said Alyson.

She remembers in class she was always a good girl, doing her work and paying attention. On the other hand, he was the athlete, who liked to play around too much. “I remember his mom would always have to come into our classroom to make sure he would be doing his work. The teacher would ask a question to the entire class, and his mom would smack him in the back of his head and make him raise his hand to answer the question that he had no clue what it was! I don’t know why that has always stuck out to me!”

Like a lot of couples nowadays, Katie & Sean met on tinder. It was immediately a match.

Not long after, they were visiting some friends in Houston, Texas and they were having dinner at this unique restaurant called, One Fifth. When this restaurant first opened they were given the lease for only five years and the owner of the restaurant liked the challenge, so he decided to have a different theme each year. (That’s where the name One Fifth came from!) They open in September with a new theme, go through til the end of July, then close the restaurant to do renovations so they can present the new one again the next September.

When Katie & Sean were there the theme was “Romance Languages”, which was the perfect one for a proposal! Katie said “we sat down to eat, then right after Sean was ordering champagne to do a toast and then all at a sudden he was proposing!”