Small Business Owner Tips Wedding Photography
Running A Business With Your Significant-Other | Husband and Wife Photographers | Destination Weddings Lifestyle Blog | Apollo Fields
I woke to the sound of a sweeping rain over Montauk Lake, spraying the French doors of our friend’s guest bedroom like the ocean smashing against a cluster of coastal rocks. White caps shifted about the marina like tiny crowns of the sea as the wind buoyed the boats with a sort of smooth violence. Emerging from beneath the clean and warm white sheets of the bed posed a difficult task as Heather and I have been traveling up and down the eastern seaboard the past few days, but such is the hustle of the life of wedding photographers.
Since this past Friday, Heather and I have spent over 20 hours in the car together. As much as I love her, anyone who’s traveled that much with their significant other can imagine the frustrations that might arise. Now imagine that your significant other is also your business partner. Those 20 hours now sound like they could be that much more tense—and they absolutely can be. Yet as tired and frustrated as I have been (and still am) I wouldn’t have it any other way.
The sounds in our car during a road trip vary from Kendrick to talk radio, from laughter to earnestness, and business to barking dogs. The mood shifts from conversation-to-conversation, state-to-state, and from day to night. Long road trips with a significant other are common litmus tests to see if the relationship is the real deal; but a long road trip for a professional and romantic partnership is an endless loop of perfecting the way you communicate. Heather and I’s flare-ups range from disagreeing on something as trivial as choosing where to eat or when to stop, and something as serious as our next big business move. But the most important thing is to keep the conversation going.
Ironically, sometimes the best way to do that is to embrace a silence. So often we are quick to fill a void in time with mindless chatter, a podcast, or background tunes and we forget that our seemingly restless minds just wants us and our senses to shut the fuck up. Silence can be a great teacher, and giving the space for the tensions of our relationships to dissipate into the air can prove to be much more productive than spewing whatever our egos or inner selves are dying to say. Sometimes in a disagreement—no one person is right—and sometimes you both are. Taking the time to share a few moments of silence together has helped us more times than I can count.
This morning was one of those mornings when you wake up after you’ve traveled so much that you forget where you are. The constant waves of rain gently splashing against the doors gave me a sense of ease amidst the chaos, reminding me that there’s always beauty to be found in any given situation. Sometimes we don’t realize how fast we’re moving until we stop for a moment to look at how far we’ve come; then after we wipe the sweat from our brow, rest a little, and take a deep breath, we can go back to bouncing up and down in the tide, moving naturally with the wind through time with a sort of smooth violence.
– Terrence
