Weddings from the Pros Podcast
Episode 59 with Nathan, Corey and Kim
Newlyweds Corey & Kim take the time to discuss the essence of intentionality in their relationship and how the meaningful choices they’ve made have yielded desirable results… especially when it came to their recent weekend wedding at Hawkesdene.
In This Episode We Cover:
- Enjoying the company of families and friends in your special day, will be the most memorable part of your life.
- Quality time during your wedding day can be a vacation for all.
- Have an opportunity to know each other and have fun.
- Having a fun games can create a bond between families and friends.
Listen to the Full Podcast here!
Read the Full Transcription below!
Here at Angled light photography, We believe marriage is an amazing adventure and your wedding is the jumping off point. We'll explore planning an authentic and meaningful wedding experience as we connect with real life couples and the industry's top professionals. We're here to inspire and encourage you as you begin this journey of a lifetime. Hey, everybody welcome back to another episode of the show. I am so glad that you guys are here. That is a chilly Sunday morning. We just got done with a wedding reveal with Kim and Corey. How're you guys doing? Good, good. I'm really excited that you guys are here and I wanted to ask you to come on the show. I'm always interested in couples who really intentionally designed their wedding to get you guys on the podcast to be able to give a few tips. A few things for couples who are currently planning their wedding. Now, some things to think about, right? Because I think fundamentally I'm a big proponent of couples asking themselves the right questions, right? Like when you're planning your wedding, you've only got, like, one shot at it, right? You've only got one chance, right? And it's funny like you guys got married, remind me of like the when was it? It was October early October September. Gotcha. So September so in early September, you guys have now had a little bit of time to be able to like process and digest the wedding, right? So we're gonna talk about the wedding. Just give us a little bit of context though. How did you two meet? How did you two get together? It's been a while even though we just got married. We met nine years ago at work. We're both engineers, were both in the quality department at the time at a medical device company in New Jersey. And uh, and yeah, we were two interns and we sat back to back and yeah, we worked together for a few months and eventually I asked her out on the date, went to the movies. We saw a dark night to Yeah, yeah. Baller movie to start with man. It's like a three hour movie. Very long movie. I think we sat in the front row. Yeah, yeah, very uncomfortable. But we sat sat laying down. Yeah, right? Like looking straight up at the screen. Yeah, it went really well. And that was really paid attention to the movie much. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Still the stub though. Yeah, that's cool. So that actually leads me straight into the wedding because of this. Like you kept the stub from your first date nine years ago, right? We have a lot of difference. Yeah. So, so that that's really cool. It leads me to the idea that you guys have astounded me time and time again with how intentional you are about keeping each other at the forefront and making sure that there's a reason behind doing the things that you, that you do right? Like you guys have never struck me as the type of couple that will do anything unless there's a reason to do it right like that. It needs to be, need to be meaningful for you to invest the time or the energy or the money to do it, right? So I want to talk about your wedding and I want to talk a little about like planning your wedding, but that was like you guys got married at Hochstein in Andrews north Carolina, I think it's Andrews and Andrews north Carolina. Guys, if you've never seen this place, holy cow, it is beautiful. It's basically a private estate in the mountains of north Carolina, surrounded by the lushest, most beautiful force that you can think of, right? You got this really incredible creek that flows right next to the place. And what makes the place really special though is that it's kind of designed and built for weddings to be kind of a multiday event to be like a whole weekend, which is what you guys wanted. Right? So like where the idea for you guys come up to not do a wedding day, but to do a wedding weekend with your family. I think it's mostly because most of our families up north and they're from New York, New Jersey Pennsylvania. So we wanted to have a place for them all to stay, but we didn't like the whole wedding to be the one day done one and done right? All the extra effort of chauffeuring people back and forth. It was just very comfortable to have everyone in the same place and to feel comfortable altogether. Yeah and we know we wanted to do something in the mountains to we looked around at a few places but unfortunately we looked at the Hawks team first and it was just too beautiful and it just ruined everything thereafter and we ended up only looking at one or two other places afterwards because we could see on the internet you know you could see for the most part what the place looks like. My eyes were like glazed over for the other. They didn't even matter. Yeah unfortunately it just didn't come close. I don't know and then it's weird that a lot of people don't know about the Hochstein but it's just not very popular but when you look at it it really just doesn't compare to. Yeah I just I want to give I've been to a lot of places I've been to a lot of venues I want to lend my full fledged support behind this place in north Carolina. The food was incredible. Like breakfast, lunch, dinner incredible, it was really amazing. The service was incredible. The property has what maybe 15 cabins. Yeah it's like a little campus. Yeah it's really really impressive. So your family was able to come in at the beginning of the weekend. They were able to be there with you on site for the entire Thursday and Friday or Thursday to Sunday Thursday Friday so yeah I was there with you Friday and Saturday. Yeah, it was like Thursday or Saturday, Thursday, Sunday. And what really struck me was, you know when I was walking around on that Friday and I was kind of documenting the things that were going on your family was pretty spread out over the campus. Just everybody's doing the things that they love. Their some people going hiking right? And spending time outdoors, which is a very big deal for you guys. One of the reasons I feel like you guys chose the hawks team was because of your love for the outdoors, right? Yeah. Yeah. We'd like to do a lot of hiking. A lot of camping, especially out in that area. Yeah. And so the thing that really struck me when I was walking around and documenting Friday and Saturday was people were really spending quality time with each other, right? Like there's a difference between just seeing each other for 5, 10, 15 even to a couple of hours, right? And then like just having the time to really sit down, play a game of cards, right? You get to know how the last few years has been going for the other person, right? There's a big difference in the conversation when you spend an hour at a dinner with someone or be spent two days, right? Yeah. You get past the small talk about the right, right? Covid for freaking seconds. Yeah. And then you get to like actually enjoy your time with somebody. Yeah. Yeah. And I think for most people it was like a little getaway too because they were just relaxing themselves in the stressful nature of the year. Just yeah. I feel like no one really had a vacation in a long time just because of this time that we're in right now. Yeah. It was a beautiful place to get away. Yeah. It was incredibly relaxing. Like, I mean I was working, but like for everybody else, like I would imagine that it's incredibly relaxing. I texted everyone. I got there and I was looking around my wife and I text and I was like, we have got to come back here. Like we've got to cut like I've got to bring you here to see this because it's really what it was. I mean it was our wedding, but it really was just the biggest family vacation that, that you'll ever have to have every single person all really relaxing, you know, out in the woods somewhere. Just, it was a vacation for everyone and we're all together for 23 days at a time. It was just a big family vacation. Yeah, it was cool. And what was amazing was both of your families got a chance not to just re acquaint themselves with each other but to also get to know the other family, like how rare is that? You know what I mean? Like? Typically I've been to weddings for the first time. Both sides have met was at the wedding right? Like you could, you could you imagine I couldn't so like the idea that they really got to know each other really strong friendships were able to be, you know, created and enhanced. Like it's, it's an incredible thing. Yeah, I think that that was my favorite part about it because you can just like look at any moment and see people just mingling talking to each other, getting to know each other, especially when they were playing games in the game room downstairs. Everyone was just having so much fun and like your friends, my friends, like everybody was just my friends hanging out with her family. That was impressive. Yeah, they got along really well. Madeline was like, can you adopt me, loves this family? Like crazy things would happen right? Like what was the game that everybody got real crazy about? Like right center, left, right center is like, is it a card game? I think it was more like a gambling game because it just depends on where the dice land if you get money or not. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And again, I just want to go back like the idea that your family, your family, your friends, like everybody can come together for a couple of days and really like get to know each other and have fun. That's an experience that nobody's going to forget right? Like and I'm sorry, I can't help you to not forget because I feel like most people forget their wedding because it's too fast and it's too quick and this helps us to not forget because we were able to spread things out and not to worry so much at the wedding. That did I talk to this person, oh did I talk to that person? And it's not all these short conversations, you get time to relax and and just hang out with someone for an hour. You knew that you got to everybody. Yeah, that's everyone before the wedding even happens. So by the time the wedding was just time to relax. 100%. 100%. Yeah. One of the conversations that I tend to talk with couples a lot about is how do you be present? Right? How do you not let all the craziness because like, there's so many moving parts on the wedding day, right? Like there's so much going on. How do you not let any of that get to you affect you or pull you away from being present in the moment and really enjoying what's going on because like, it's like an incredible thing, getting married to the person that you love the most in the world. Like it's an incredible thing, right? Yeah, that's such a great point. I think to add to that is the coordinator and I think we really learned how important the coordinator is because the better coordinator is the less effort that you have to put into everything and the more you can relax and by going to the hawks team, what happened for us was we went and dealt with a coordinator that only coordinates at this place. So she knew exactly what to do at all times because she does the same thing every weekend where a couple of weekends later we went to someone else's wedding and they did not have a good coordinator and they didn't have a great time at their wedding because they had to put so much effort themselves. You know, how much, so much stress themselves and decisions that they had to make where we don't really have to make any decisions. We didn't really do much at the wedding other than just try to enjoy ourselves. We did what people told us to do and they told us exactly what to do when we needed to do it. Yeah, they did a good job was really not a lot of thought on our part, but the people that work there were so helpful because you know, anytime somebody needed to be shuttled to their cabin, I would ask like can you take them or you know, you can just ask anybody for help. And it was it was kind of done. Yeah, that's awesome. It's funny, like I always tell people and I've said it probably 1000 times at this point in this podcast. The two people like everybody's gonna have a photographer, right? Like that's just kind of a given. But the two people in the wedding day that most people try to go without or will try to skimp on is the wedding coordinator like a planner of some kind, a lot of brides will be like, I'm type a like, I can do this myself, I've got this, it's fine. Right? And then the other person is like a DJ or some kind of entertainment for the evening. I've been to quite a few weddings where, you know, they did like a Spotify playlist or something like that or they didn't really invest in the entertainment and then the party just kind of falls flat, right? Because there's like an entertainer as an entertainer, right? Whether they're behind a DJ board or they're playing the saxophone. Like what was going on, y 'all's wedding, which I want to talk about this is, this is like the perfect leeway. Like you guys purposefully thought about the experience that your guests are going to have like that. I know Corey, it was important to both of you guys, but I remember Corey, you talked about that a lot leading up to the wedding. Yeah, just the whole atmosphere. Everything is very important. We did hire a band, we didn't go too crazy expensive on the band, but we wanted a certain, you know, we wanted just to, everyone to feel relaxed and her mother in particular. It's kind of more like traditional to a wedding. We tried to get like a smooth jazz band, something that would really a little bit more to them even though we're in the middle of the mountains somewhere. So that might be a little weird, but it worked out and it wasn't weird to anybody and it didn't feel weird. Yeah, but the entertainment, it was like having the live music, it did feel very classy. You know, like the dinner was going on, all the transitional stuff was happening. But then like they got buck wild. Like they were so much fun. Do you remember the name of the band? Yes. Jazz revolution. Jazz revolution. Okay, cool guys. Like again, I got photos and Preston if you listen to this, throw it up on the edit like so people can actually see these photos. But like there's like a saxophone is starting a conga line was playing like awesome. Like the place was on fire. Like it was nuts when we came down off the mountain after doing some portraits. It was just like 100 and 10. Like it went from 0 to 100 like real fast. Yeah, I had full confidence in them because talking with electron the band leader before, he was just saying how he knows how to get the crowd, you know, hyped up in the crowd on the dance. He just like assured me that I didn't have to worry about the performance part and if people were going to dance or not. Yeah, that made me feel really good. Yeah, it was cool because you guys started the evening with the band and then transition into a DJ. Somebody who was playing music tonight, which was I thought a cool, cool idea. Oh my gosh. Yeah, they had like a full sound system more than I thought. They had the lights. They had the giant speakers, So much equipment and they're technically not a DJ. You know, they, so that was a part of the band. Yeah, they played my playlist. She should talk about that first. Yeah. So maybe, you know, other people don't have to go as crazy as I did. But the place had speakers all over. So when everybody's eating breakfast or lunch or dinner. I just wanted there to be certain music playing music that I yeah, I was specific with the songs, I handpicked every single songs and it must have been like, you know, thousands of songs. 20 hours. Yeah, wow. Not exaggerated. Late nights working on that. It's not actually did. 20 hours. No, no created 20 hours. Don't ask how many hours it took a long time. So why was that? Was it just is music really important to you? Yeah. Yeah. We just knew we didn't want to have music that we didn't like playing at our wedding, especially during the reception part. You know, you're playing the traditional music kind of like shout and like, you know, those types of songs, neither of us are very like radio music people are very like mainstream music people. So we like our own type of music and we wanted that to be at our wedding. Yeah. That's awesome. But I think there's a great lesson in there, which is, you've only got so many hours in the day, right? Like when you're planning your wedding to keep as much stress off you as possible. You know, think about the things that really, really matter to you. Like the things that you really value right? And pass off the stuff that you don't really care about. Like pass that off to other people who know how to do it well, right? And get that off your plate. And that way you can focus on the things that really do matter to you. You know what I mean? For us it was music, it was photos and it was the scenery. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's cool. That's awesome. So I like to say that this podcast is for people to learn from those who went before, Right? So like the whole idea is that we're going to share with people. Like what was the things that you walked away with? Like, well maybe one or two or three tips would you have for people who is like in the midst right now planning their wedding, what would you suggest to them to do And you know, this is totally up to you guys. Like whatever tips you'd like to give. I think you don't have to splurge, You don't have to spend all your money, but you do want a certain level of quality and you know, there is a middle of the road that you can choose. And there's also research that you can do to make sure whoever you're choosing is actually good. I think you know, the wedding that we went to later, she didn't do a lot of research about the person, you know that the coordinator, the photographer because somebody had flicked out on her. So if she had a lot of last minute, I think DJ and photographer the week of, she had to re that makes me sick. I can't imagine being the couple stressful. Yeah, exactly. So if you get somebody really with a good reputation, longstanding reputation, I think you're getting something worthwhile. That's cool. Do you want to touch on the research things like how do you do research? Did you, was it just like online reviews and that kind of stuff? Yeah. There's plenty of websites like Wedding Wire, the not Zola, there's plenty of websites that you can use to just look at the vendor, look at their reviews. Look at their star ratings and you can talk to them of course and kind of get an understanding of what they do, how they do it. I think the best thing is just getting that full picture to understand like what is it going to really look like in the end. For sure. Yeah, for sure. That's a great tip. Yeah. And of course, I think the main theme of this was just spending as much time as possible with everyone. You can't afford it. You have an extra night with everybody, you know, I can't always be at the same facility, but you know, you can coordinate just, everyone stands an extra night at the hotel or something. Yeah, I was thinking about that. It's just always hopeful. Like an alternative is like if you do have a wedding at a hotel which most people do or at least the family is staying in a hotel nearby, you can have it. So you're staying there for a longer period of time, you know, tell them that the wedding is from this day to this day and then plan of events, you know, everybody's gonna go smart, there could be a winery or brewery, you know, something like local or you're talking about language. Exactly. And then you're not worried about, okay, the wedding is the only time going to talk to this person. Yeah. So the last wedding that I just photographed or maybe the second last wedding, I just photographed, they got a big, big Airbnb and so like that was the way that they were able to spend a little bit of time with family beforehand. And also like everybody's able to cook there. They actually hired a chef to come in and the chef cooked there at the Airbnb. So like there's, there's, there's all kinds of really create, you know, awesome things that you can do if you can't rent out like a Yeah, because it's really funny because when we first very first started our wedding kind of search, which was probably two years ago now because, you know, we had to postpone a year for covid, but when we first started, we were really not trying to spend a lot of money. It's hard at this age, you know, to just come out of college and just start and then spend all this money. It's very difficult. But if you have the opportunity, we had the opportunity where kim's parents wanted to help us out. So we said, all right. And then we really decided, you know, what's important to us. And the photos were important, spending a couple extra days was important, coordination was important. And we did splurge on those things and we're really happy about it. Now, that's really excited for the photo album and yeah, man, all these photos, it's really exciting. That's cool, man. Yeah, that's great. That's a great tip too, because I always feel the topical budget always comes up when we're talking about weddings. It is hard because there's a big part of you that's like, okay, I could take this money and I could probably do something else with this money, and you guys, again, you guys are very intentional people, right? Like, I'm sure that there was a lot of conversations you guys had that revolved around, like we could take this money or we can invest it, right? We did prioritize a few years back, we already bought our house, you know, and that was a big decision. We decided to buy our house before we decided to get married. We did put that first, and like I said, luckily we were able to have kim's parents help without that, we wouldn't have been able to do this really, but once we got that, and then we went full steam ahead. Yeah, and I think that's probably pretty important for couples, because they have, even on netflix that show marriage mortgage or marriage versus mortgage, and they kind of show you, okay, you can get this house or you can have this kind of wedding, which one will you choose? And I think it's really important to just set up your foundation, like where you're going to live, where you're going to stay where you're going to be after you get married, because if you're in like, a one bedroom apartment after you get married, maybe you want a bigger place, but you just spend all that money, so you can't, so then you have to wait for a year or two until you can it's such a it's such a great point. You guys are dropping bombs, but that's a good point there. Like the thing to remember there and this is all considering that everybody's different, like everybody has different priorities and thinks about like there might be couples out there who's happy to be in a studio apartment and like they're so content. They like it that way, right? But there's also couples that might not do so well and that might cause a lot of friction, right? Because you don't have the space and you don't have like it does. I think, I think you're right and that a lot of it comes down just being self aware. Like know who you are. Really take the time to have those that communication and those conversations with your partner and try to figure out what you guys are going to need to like set yourself up after the wedding, like in your marriage to have a successful as stress free as possible time, Right? Exactly. Because after the wedding you just want to relax. Like it's a big release, you know, so you want to be comfortable. You don't want to think about all right now we're going to go house hunting and that's a whole other exciting. It can be exciting, exciting. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, it also could be stressful too. So yeah, I think also with the help with your parents, like if you don't have that. I think the biggest thing is like you think about your most important Parts of the wedding that you want and that's where you spend the money, the rest of the items, you know, you can cheap out on 100%. Yeah. I think the way to go for sure, was there another tip that you guys had? Was there anything about your wedding that you would have changed? Like if you could go back and do it again, let me think about that for a second. There's not too much that I would change. Our wedding was really great. I think, no, I think just the only vendor that I didn't like was the florist and that has nothing to do with like, I mean that's kind of where we checked out on because the flowers weren't as important as the other items. We'll just leave that part out. Yeah. Everything was, it was great. Yeah. I didn't expect it to be as good as it was expected to be great and it was even better. Yeah, it was it was unbelievable. I just hope I can remember it all. That's the problem. That's why I'm excited about the photos and the album because I want to remember it all for sure. Well guys, it's been so much fun talking to you and kind of reliving, you know, getting to go back and spend time with the couples. Like I was telling kim earlier, it's like, it's not my goal to make couples cry, but like, but like when it happens, I know that like I did what I was trying to do, which was which was just create something that, you know, resonates with you and something that brings back the feeling of what it felt like to be there. And, you know, to me a great photograph and what we strive to do is to create photographs that just when you look at it makes you feel something right? It makes you feel something so I'm so happy that you guys enjoyed it. And this was an incredible experience. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thank you. Thank you for all your work at our wedding. Amazing. Thanks. We really enjoyed it. Thanks guys. Thank you guys. If you take away one thing from this conversation, it's this really, really invest some time with your partner. Be intentional about the choices that you're making when it comes to the people that you're surrounding yourself with, the place that you're having the wedding, the amount of quality time that you're spending with people that you love most in your life. And these are the things that's going to allow you to have an incredible wedding experience and walk away from it. Not regretting a thing. We hope that you guys enjoyed the conversation. Have an incredible day, a great month in a fantastic year. I'll see you next time here, angle life photography. We believe marriage is an amazing adventure and your wedding is the jumping off point. We'll explore planning authentic and meaningful wedding experience as we connect with real life couples and the industry's top professionals. We're here to inspire and encourage you as you begin this journey of a lifetime.
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