Taking the time to take photos

Hey look, my hair got straighter in four years!

By my first year of college, I was already that artsy girl who would would give out handmade gifts, hand-monogrammed gloves, and personalized shot class sets. I was a little like that girl Melissa Joan Hart plays in Can't Hardly Wait that was crazed about getting her yearbook signed. I knew that every photo I was in or was taking would be important to me and to my friends down the line.


With that in mind, by the end of freshman year, I'd concocted the following project for me and my best friends at Duke. Every year, let's take the same photo- by the time we graduate (hopefully in four years, right?) we'd have a photographic keepsake to last us a lifetime and a time capsule of how hot we looked in college. Double the awesome, essentially.


We set out for Duke Chapel - the most incredible chapel of all the universities I've ever attended, by far. We had planned to take one picture. We ended up doing a photo shoot for over two hours all around the campus and in the beautiful Sarah P. Duke Gardens. So was born a tradition we continued for all four years of college, through countless exams, one wedding, several med school, dental school, and pharmacology school acceptances, and not nearly enough trips to the Dillo for nachos.

As you can see from above, having these photos and the ones I've included below captured a lot of special moments for us and is a great way to look back at how we've changed. We're now living in LA and working for Disney, going to Med School in Cleveland, married and in Dental School in Chapel Hill, just been promoted in DC, and getting a PhD/owning her first HOUSE in Nashville! 

Who knows what the next set of pictures will have in store? There's no telling, but I'm really glad we took those few hours every year to document our time together.