Cristina & Cătălin, Artist The Barn, Saftica

Celebration. We think this is the word that defines the wedding of Cristina and Cătălin. But in a rather different way. A way where love floats in every direction and it embraces everything.

We photographed the getting ready at their home. In the girls’ room, with the painted animals on the walls and the small shelves with their photographs. Cristina was in her wedding dress. One of the twins was on the changing table. Nobody was performing anything. We stayed and watched a family do what families do on an ordinary morning, which happened to also be a wedding day.

The ceremony went quiet, emotional, relaxed. We remember the moments, those moments will live again and again in their wedding gallery. We found a way to stop them forever.

After the ceremony, while the guests were still finding their way out, Cristina sat down on the church floor in her dress, and the girls came to her. It is one of those little stories inside a story that moves us to press the shutter.

This is what the day looked like from inside it: two people who love each other, surrounded by the people who came to be with them, and two small girls who moved through all of it freely, without anyone asking them to be different from what they were.

We spent most of this wedding day like this. Watching a story unfold, no requirements, no intervention.

For portraits we moved to the fields behind Artist The Barn. The light in July in this part of Romania is honest and flat and gives you nothing for free. We found one spot and asked them for twenty minutes. They forgot we were there before the twenty minutes were up.

The reception was loud and full and nobody was watching the clock. By midnight the dance floor was past the point of return, the way it gets when the right people are in a room together and none of them wants to be the first to leave.

Cristina and Cătălin did not give us a wedding to document. They gave us a day to be present in.

We will forever cherish it.

If that is the kind of day you are planning, we would love to hear from you.