Wilder Ranch E-Session: Matt & Claire

They sat on our couch sip­ping hot tea and it felt as though we’d been child­hood friends. Claire’s curly hair hung over her shoul­der and her bright blue eyes radi­ated with love. We started our meet­ing with Matt and Claire, like we do all of your ini­tial meet­ings, lis­ten­ing to the story of how they fell in love. I could tell within min­utes that they were a match for us. Any­one could see how excited they are about their story, and how much they enjoy telling it, which is pre­cisely the rea­son why we are a per­fect match for each other. Matt and Claire have cho­sen us to con­tinue telling their story through pic­tures and we couldn’t be more thrilled about it.

Claire started her story with, “It’s a tale of two cities really.” You see Matt is a south­ern boy from a coun­try town in Vir­ginia. I don’t really know if it’s coun­try, but since it’s Vir­ginia and I like sto­ries, coun­try paints a pret­tier pic­ture for me. His accent imme­di­ately gives him away, but I’m quite cer­tain it’s what caused Claire to fall head over heels for him. Claire, on the other hand, was home­grown in the San Fran­cisco Bay Area, but to me, she looks like the quin­tes­sen­tial south­ern belle. From oppo­site ends of the U.S., it was God who brought them together. No lit­er­ally, they were at church in the mid­dle of a wor­ship song.

Claire was on stage singing in the wor­ship band. As she peered out into the crowd, she noticed a new face. Being the social but­ter­fly that she is, it obvi­ously perked her inter­est, but the thought imme­di­ately escaped her mind when the fol­low­ing happened.

As Claire was leav­ing the stage, her pas­tor and long­time friend, came up to give the ser­mon. Before begin­ning, he tran­si­tions with, “Wasn’t that a great song from Claire? It’s been amaz­ing to watch her grow up in life and in her walk with the Lord. All you sin­gle guys, you should know that she’s still avail­able.” Though obvi­ously mor­ti­fy­ing, one could argue that his words were almost prophetic.

After the church ser­vice Claire went to lunch with a bunch of friends and to her delight the “new face” she spot­ted while at church hap­pened to sit close by. She finally got to put a name with the face. She found out that he was “Matt from Vir­ginia” and that he is quite rigid and shy at first. Being the bub­bly per­son she is, she spoke more and laughed louder in hopes to loosen him up. After pry­ing more infor­ma­tion out of him, they found out they had one thing in com­mon — the Food Net­work. That’s all it took. Once they found that com­mon ground, the new face quickly became a new friend.

As they told the story of how they grew closer in their friend­ship, Matt and Claire seemed to move closer to each other on the couch. He nat­u­rally placed his hand on her leg as she spoke and you could see by his gen­tle touches that they were madly in love. I didn’t need to hear the rest of the story. Their glances, their touches and their laugh­ter said it all.

But to my delight, she con­tin­ued and shared about a piv­otal point in their rela­tion­ship when their friend­ship turned into some­thing more. Matt hand taken her to a din­ner party which, to me, already indi­cates some­thing more than friend­ship. But you know us girls, we need to hear them say it. This was a make it or break it evening for Claire. If he didn’t tell her he was inter­ested, she was going to just give up. They had a lovely evening together fol­lowed by a great con­ver­sa­tion over­look­ing the view of the city, but he said noth­ing. It wasn’t until they were sit­ting out­side of her house and she was about to get out of the car that it hap­pened. Claire was fed up and was just about to speak her mind when Matt instantly cut her off. Finally find­ing the courage and filled with emo­tion, his phone flew from his hands as he screamed out, “I like you! I like you a lot!”

They laughed with each other and at each other as they brought their story to an end. And that is exactly why we love them. I enjoyed every minute of their story and I asked a mil­lion ques­tions after they were fin­ished. I’m sorry, but I’m into details. As they left the meet­ing that day, I couldn’t decide if I was more excited to have them as new clients or new friends. Thank­fully, they are a two for one deal.

Matt & Claire, we are so excited for the oppor­tu­nity to pho­to­graph your wed­ding and even more excited to have become your friends. Your love is plainly writ­ten on both of your faces and I can only imag­ine how won­der­ful your future together will be. Your abil­ity to laugh with and at each other will get you through the dif­fi­cult times. We can’t wait to see where the next chap­ter will take you. Con­grat­u­la­tions again! ~V&C

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We pho­tographed Matt & Claire’s engage­ment ses­sion at Wilder Ranch in Santa Cruz, CA.

We started at the near by train tracks for two rea­sons. 1) because I’m in love with old things and train tracks bring your imag­i­na­tion to a whole other era. 2) because we thought they per­fectly rep­re­sented their story of two roads com­ing together to become one.

Matt and Claire showed up to the engage­ment ses­sion with a truck­load full of props to use in their pic­tures. It ignited my imag­i­na­tion and made me fall even more in love with these two.

Matt & Claire took dance lessons together. They are going to be totally set for their first dance on the wed­ding day.

We could pho­to­graph those eyes all day and don’t even get me started on the hair. Do not!

One of my favs — that look says it all.

This one makes me smile. The oth­ers make me laugh, but this one just makes me feel so happy.

Claire was not the only one work­ing the cam­era that day.

Embark­ing on a com­pletely new jour­ney in life, it was only appro­pri­ate to doc­u­ment it.

Another one that really speaks to me.