love thursday: witness

While I was in Salt Lake City, I had the chance to meet the immensely talented Justin Hackworth, a wedding and portrait photographer based in Provo, Utah.  Justin was also on my panel at the Altitude Design Summit (discussing photography on the web), and I cannot begin to tell you what a lovely person he is without embarrassing myself by gushing.  In addition, it was just so interesting talking with him, particularly because we come to photography from different places:  he's always been a professional photographer who recently started a blog; me, I used blogging to help improve my photography.  In any event, we really clicked (ha! see what I did there?), so I was pretty thrilled when he suggested we take portraits of each other.

Right before our panel, I had the chance to meet his lovely wife of almost 10 years, Amy; after we were finished, I showed her a couple of the images from the display on the back of my camera that I had taken of him.  "Those are great," she said.  "I'm so happy to have them -- we have very few pictures of him, or of us, for that matter."

"You want to take some now?" I asked.

"Really?"

"Well, you're here, he's here, I have my camera, it seems silly not to, don't you think?"

"Wow ... sure! Thanks!"

And so we went back to the lobby, and I shot a few more.

What's amazing about the above images is that none of them were staged in any way -- they just sat down together, and we were all talking and I was just shooting, and these were the images that resulted.  And it occurred to me that this is probably why Justin is so successful as a wedding photographer:  because this is a man who clearly knows love.

* * * * * * *

Happy Love Thursday everyone.  Please feel free to leave your stories or links to your words and images of love in the comments below.

And may you know love today.

Song: It's love by Jill Scott