More Than “Just” Photographers – Inspiration for an AMAZING Life
Dreaming, Our Dreams //
Over the last few weeks, we have fielded many questions and heartfelt comments from some of our closest friends about our business and our new brand. (ie. Why did you drop photography from your name? When I go to your website, I can’t even tell it is a photographers website. etc.) All of these questions have come from their hearts and have ended up in great conversation!
The truth is, a lot of thought went into the Liz and Ryan brand and new site. When we went through the rebranding process with Making Brands Happen, we were challenged to dig deep and we came up with a few realizations that lead us to where we are today with a website that helps us achieve our goals of being more than “just” photographers:
1. The thing we LOVE most about being “photographers” is the ability to make a difference in people’s lives. Yes, we LOVE to provide amazing photographs that our couples and clients can cherish for years and generations to come. However, we even more so love the process. Over the years of owning our own “photography” business, we have realized that the moments we get to spend with our clients are cherished moments. It is usually a few hours they have given of their time to us and it is our responsibility to take those few hours and make them magical. We have realized that we have the power in those few hours to really impact their lives… and THAT is our love.
2. We have the ability to make a difference in the lives of others everyday! Our blog provides an online platform that gives us the opportunity to reach out and share a little bit of inspiration to more people than we could ever imagine photographing.
3. We are unique and we have something special to share! We are 27 and 28 (soon to be 29 with a big b-day for Ryan coming up! WAHOO!) years old. We are happily married for over 5 years (yes, we got married young! ;) ) and we wake up more in love than ever each and every day. We have worked the corporate jobs that we thought would make us successful and after realizing there was so much more to life than sitting at a desk doing work that we were not passionate about, we took our careers into our own hands. We took the time to dream and with God’s help, we created our business. We have taken HUGE leaps and risks. All of these things, we have done with passion and love together. These decisions and actions have lead us to this point in our lives where we feel INCREDIBLY blessed.
We love living the unconventional life. We love taking time to dream and then following our hearts to make those dreams a reality. We love date nights and entertaining with our friends. We love finding new recipes and challenging ourselves to make them… together. We love seeing something in a store and thinking, “we can make that”… and then actually doing it. We love being grateful for every single day that we have been given. THIS is our AMAZING LIFE.
4. Living an AMAZING LIFE (whatever that may look like to each individual) is certainly something that everyone strives to achieve and we can help people get there. We have the ability through our everyday interaction with our online friends and in person with our clients to provide inspiration and encouragement to seek out that Amazing Life… to think about what that looks like and make it happen!
5. By sharing examples of living an AMAZING LIFE, we have the ability to inspire other people to live their own AMAZING lives.
It is our goal with our new brand and http://lizandryan.com to do just that. Yes, we are still photographers and we LOVE that experience of capturing AMAZING LIVES. God has given us a talent to help illustrate our couples and clients storybooks of their amazing lives and we are honored to be able to do that. However, we never see ourselves as “just” photographers.
We have a passion for love and love stories. When we photograph our couples, it is ALWAYS our goal to help them feel more in love than ever. We want them to wake up everyday feeling incredibly blessed. We want them to look at their photographs every single day and remember that exact moment it was taken and the AMAZING love they share.
We have a passion to seek out happiness and what brings people happiness. By sharing things that bring us happiness (cooking and DIYing), we hope to spark a passion and interest in others to find what makes them happy.
We have a passion to be surrounded by amazing people and to share our love for entertaining with them. Any excuse we can come up with to pull our creative spirit together to host a party and share a good time with our friends and family… we are on it! ;) It is true that surrounding yourself by incredible people makes you a happier person. AND when you can throw in an excuse to celebrate together… that makes it even better!
So… as you can see, we are passionate about a lot of things! ;) But the overarching theme is that we are passionate about living an AMAZING life and doing everything that we can to inspire others to live their own AMAZING life. We are certainly not “just” photographers, but we believe in the power of inspiration and making this world a better place! Documenting it along the way is one incredible gift we have to share!
If you haven’t seen our promo video yet, be sure to check it out below to learn a little bit more about us and our passion to live a more AMAZING LIFE.
Liz and Ryan: This is Us // Promo Video // by Jeremy Mitchell Cinema on Vimeo