Kait & Miles - Madison, WI Engagement Photographer
Kait and I met for coffee a few weeks ago to discuss her vision for an engagement shoot. Her company was a joy in itself, but as we brainstormed how to capture her and Miles’s love story, I could tell that we were on the same page. All we needed was the right amount of snow cover, and the right kind of golden light. For the sake of storytelling, Wisconsin’s winter hung around as the ideal backdrop.
This couple is already perfection, but their Yorkie Cujo of course had to make his adorable cameo. What would these photographs be without their “How we met/how did he propose” story. If you’re looking for a unique love story that will make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, keep reading. Kait is a brilliant writer, and she tells it best:
"Poetry brought us together, but we really connected over our love of music (and cheese fries.)
Miles and I were familiar faces in the same New York City poetry community, but we didn't chat often until I booked him as a feature at the weekly reading series I curated in spring of 2015. We met over coffee to talk booking logistics and ended up gushing over Caroline Smith, a singer we both saw play our favorite venues years before while he was living in Minnesota and I was in Pennsylvania.
That summer, Miles started frequenting the open mic I hosted and I started looking forward to our Monday night banter on books, bands and the great beach debate: Coney Island vs the Rockaways.
July of 2015 brought a few of our favorite bands to Prospect Park, and he had season tickets. Neither of us knew if it was "a date" or just a couple of music lovers having a totally normal, not at all nerve-wracking evening out. (You can probably guess where this is going.) We found a table and ordered pints and parmesan fries before heading to our seats, but we ended up so engaged in our conversation that we nearly missed the show! A few days later, when the New Pornographers were playing, we both went in pretty confident that this was a date. We spent the rest of the summer splitting fries at the beach and sharing our favorite parts of New York with each other.
By July of 2016, Miles had accepted an offer from University of Wisconsin Law School in his hometown of Madison. I decided to join him and Cujo, so the three of us packed into a rental van and headed west. This past November, he surprised me with a staycation at my favorite local hotel. During our morning ritual (he makes coffee and brings two mugs back to bed where sip side by side) I noticed something was different. Inside my coffee cup was a crystal box with a gorgeous ring! (Don't worry, he had an actual cup of coffee for me hidden in the hallway.) He took a knee and held up the ring, catching the sapphire morning light streaming through the window, and I said yes.
We chose a date and a venue and just recently learned that Caroline Smith - the singer we first got giddy over in that Brooklyn coffee shop - is booked to play the venue exactly a year before our wedding!"
This session is the perfect tale of a writer, a future lawyer, and their beloved canine companion living on an eclectic isthmus. The ring was even custom-made at a local, neighborhood shop that is a Madison favorite: Burnie’s Rock Shop. Kait and Miles, congratulations on this chapter of your lives together, and I can’t wait to see how your story evolves. It was an absolute honor, joy, and privilege photographing your lovely little family.
