Happy birthday, Jon! This session was Jon’s birthday present from Jamie, and we hope we delivered. :) Jon is super into photos, and he found us a couple years ago when looking for a wedding photographer, but unfortunately we were already booked for their date. So they hung around and continued to follow us and we were super happy when they returned to us this year for his bday photos! They looove pictures and we love pictures and we also love people who love taking pictures. They also love and are very discerning about ice cream, which is important. We, too, consider ourselves ice cream connoisseurs, so we were thrilled when they introduced us to Treat in downtown Raleigh (in City Market facing S. Blount) and even more thrilled when they had chocolate peanut butter ice cream (because yessss). We had a super seriously fun (and tasty) time photographing these guys and wish them both a wonderful, slightly early happy 2nd wedding anniversary!

These guys. They’re like us, only they don’t have two cats. But sometimes they borrow their friend’s cat, so they’re basically us. Gretchen and Jason are two of our favorite people. We first met Gretchen doing weddings as she is a fabulous wedding planner. She owns her own business called RedBird Events (go check her website out!) and if you hire both us and Gretchen, you may come across us whispering in a corner somewhere. And it might look suspicious, but really we’re just planning our Halloween parties and comparing notes on costumes. When we finally decided to hang out together in real life, we met her husband Jason for the first time. He showed up wearing this shirt, whose image has been my go-to Facebook timeline image every November for the past several years, and so we loved him immediately.

Interesting Fact about Gretchen+Jason: “Gretchen and I have both dislocated the same knee. It’s our left one. I don’t mean this as a collective shared knee, but that we’ve both dislocated our own knees. Although, now I’m wondering what a shared knee would look like. Assuming we were actually physically joined together at marriage into something like conjoined twins, I’m wondering where we’d connect and how it would look. I’ll ponder this a bit more today.”

Now we are lifer friends and we enjoy their company. Jason does a mean Morrissey impression during RockBand, and Gretchen sings adorable songs that she writes about Star Wars, so they’re kind of my favorite band when you put them both together. Here are some options for their future album cover:

Meet Bebop. Bebop is a cat who lives in a skyscraper in downtown Raleigh with his owners, Kerry and Alex. Bebop enjoys looking out the window at the little cars, watching the hawks who live in the Wachovia building, chasing his treats across the floor, and staring intently at his parents while they cook dinner from a bar stool at the counter. Kerry and Alex were the main focal point of this engagement session, I think, but we temporarily forgot this when we met Bebop and Kerry and Alex subsequently took a back seat for a while so we could make a new best friend. We’re afraid to post the following pictures because then Bebop might see them and realize that he wasn’t 100% the star of the show and be upset with us, so Kerry and Alex, please try to stop him from looking at them after the first couple of photos. We wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings.