How To Be Yourself For Your Wedding | Nontraditional Atlanta Wedding

This. Couple. Though. If you are looking for a cool and practical wedding experience, Francesca and Adam will show you how it's done!

One thing that a lot of folks seem to forget in the wedding planning phase: Just be yourselves. Don't force a tradition, venue, theme, food or clothing that doesn't match who you are. Remember, what people think about your wedding will never be as important as you staying true to yourself. Francesca and Adam totally aced this! They wore what they wanted, said 'I do' the way they wanted, ate some damn ice cream and tacos on their wedding day and still got to chill with the people they truly cared about at a hip local cidery.

We kicked things off with some portraits of these two together. My preferred style of capturing portraits is to be less posey and more candid. I try to put couples in a situation to interact with each other rather than forcing some ridiculous pose that we all know isn't natural for human beings. I believe that this documentary style allows for those natural smiles and laughs to shine through. And let me tell you cousin, Francesca and Adam were great!

I asked them a few weeks ago if they'd like to write out their love story. Adam wrote me back something really powerful. It's about his love story, but also about the socially constructed misconception of love.

"Due to my obsession with movies, I grew up with a misconception about love. First off, movies have lied to us the whole time; Birds don’t sing and sparks don’t fly. Did you know that? Because I didn’t. I thought I would reach for the same piece of fruit as someone else, our hands touch, we would share a laugh and BOOM; Love. I thought it was something that you felt immediately and something you knew after five, maybe seven, hours. Turns out It doesn’t work like that at all…. November 15th 2015; just a regular day. I had a date with a woman who was noticeably cooler than myself (she wore a leather jacket). It started with an awkward hug but I recovered with some good laughs and although she ended the date abruptly; I understood her reason when she told me that “Walking Dead starts in 25 minutes”. We made the usual promise to do something again real soon; it’s always “real soon”. I left thinking that was nice but it wasn’t anything more than that because I did not see a single animated creature singing on the way home. But that’s how it starts; how it REALLY starts. If anybody tells you differently they are selling you something. To be honest, we didn’t even make good on the “real soon” part of the promise. She was going back and forth to Jacksonville to visit her family and had birthday stuff going on; I had this new video game. However, we kept in touch via cute text messages; our banter became the stuff of legend. So much in fact that when our next date finally arrived (a couple of weeks later) I was afraid that my nerdy, Steve Urkel self would pale in comparison to the suave Han Solo type person I had obviously come across as via text message. Turns out I was somewhere in the middle; maybe a smidge closer to Urkel. Lucky for me, that must be her type because we kept going on more and more dates. The more we spent time together, the more natural things felt. Over time, I realized that love isn’t like the movies at all, love doesn’t hit you like a ton of bricks. Love is just a foundation of moments. Some are big moments but most are small; So tiny that you don’t appreciate them until later. Francesca says that she knew she was in love with me when I flew out of town for a weekend to visit an old friend; the deep, dark void created by the absence of my awesomeness made her aware of how much she loved me. I may have embellished that a bit but she told me to write this so that’s how it went down. I was gone for 3 days but within the first few hours when she knew that I was out of touch and she was back to that single life routine; she knew she never wanted to go back again. My moment came a little bit later, but first you should know one thing about me. Tangents are my jam; My mind goes on walkabout all the time. Apparently one of my classics ramblings was “Best Movie Monster Books from Elementary School”; I must have blacked out during because I don’t remember. Jump to May 13th; It’s my birthday and Francesca hands me this present, its square, its heavy and by touch I have no clue what it could be. As I rip it open I realized that It’s not one thing but rather four. King Kong, The Wolf-Man, The Creature From The Black Lagoon and Dracula. She had unearthed the lost treasure from my childhood. I must have taken a long pause because she immediately gets defensive and starts explaining the gift. I stop her by grabbing her hand and with tears in my eyes I said “I love you”. In the end all I can say is that love is fickle and it just doesn’t make sense. I walked into a bar on November 15th and knew I was in love on May 13th; Somewhere all along the way, during a thousand shared moments, I fell for her. Honestly, I don’t think you could’ve scripted it any better."