Manchester Wedding Photographer - Kate McCarthy Photography

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A New Kind of Happily Ever After

Once upon a time, a young art student from Vermont (USA, New England, not part of New York, close to Canada) with a serious case of wanderlust packed up her freezing cold Portland, Maine apartment, said goodbye to another winter of skiing to the local bar and hopped on a plane to a more exotic locale...even colder but flatter (and with much less snow) Hamburg, Germany. 

There, our heroine scoured the Flohmärkte without a clear idea of what it was she was looking for.  She brought home porcelain fawns with outrageous eyelashes, polyester dresses with loud 60s patterns to make Liberty blush, delicate glass pastel perfume bottles, German pressings of Rolling Stones records, English-translated Swedish paperbacks, vintage seaside Postcards and filled the walls and shelves of her tiny basement flat with her treasures.  There was no rhyme or reason to her findings, she was just after being inspired.  Until one day she came upon a clunky, heavy, but pristine 35 year old Minolta SRT II that had barely been used.  She snapped it and an antique tripod up for a mere €20, loaded it up with film and re-discovered her first love of photography. 

And with that simple purchase, my fate was set before me.  It was many more years before I finally had the courage to leave my full-time job and really pursue my love of photography but it is more than just taking pictures that excites me: it's capturing the intimacy of a family or of a couple, of truly experiencing the joy of love's many forms and preserving it on some scale.  And the privilege of being invited into your lives is my greatest honour.

So this blog is for you, to hopefully inspire you and show you the love and beauty of this big (but very small) world that we share; to offer an outsider's perspective and re-imagine a new love story, one between you and your children or your sister or your superhero spouse, to offer a new version of happily-ever-after.  Enjoy.

Love,

Kate x