We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sam Murch a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Sam, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to start by getting your thoughts on what you are seeing as some the biggest trends emerging in your industry.
In the Colorado market, the biggest trend that I am seeing in the wedding photography, and wedding industry in general, is wave of couples planning smaller weddings. This doesn’t mean smaller in terms of budget or luxury. I don’t think wedding spending has changed or decreased at all in the mountain wedding industry.
What I’m seeing, as a wedding photographer, is that couples are focused so much more on experience and intimacy with a smaller group of family and friends. Couples are choosing to bring their guests to some of the more remote areas of the state, like Telluride, Ouray, or Crested Butte, and they are creating a whole weekend or week’s worth of activities with their guests. The trend is spending multiple days celebrating with 20-50 of your favorite people in a place that encourages togetherness and adventure in nature.
As a wedding photographer, I’m being asked more often to capture multiple days or events for these weddings instead of just the day of the ceremony. I love it! Spending more time with couples and their guests leads to a much more comfortable connection between all of them and me, and much more honest and vulnerable imagery.
There is also a huge trend for the high-end couples, in my market, to be more concerned with the feelings and nature captured in their images, and the connections between them and their guests, and less of a focus on creating a certain aesthetic or publication focused imagery. These two trends together are really wonderful to see. I’ve gotten to witness and capture some beautiful and powerful moments due to the extended time of these intimate gatherings.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
My name is Sam, I am a 38 year old mother of 5, and I live in Ouray, Colorado. I am a wedding photographer for the San Juan Mountain area of Colorado (Ouray, Telluride, Silverton, & Durango). Unlike many Colorado wedding photographers, I don’t often travel outside of this area for work. One of my favorite parts about my business is that I get to introduce couples, and their guests, to this area. When I’m getting to know them during the wedding planning stages, I really feel like I’m welcoming them into my home & backyard. It feels really special.
Before wedding photography, I taught high school theater. I loved teaching high school theatre, but when my second child was born very prematurely, I needed to pivot into a career that would allow me to be home with him and his delicate immune system once he was released from the NICU. While teaching, I had also been working part-time as a sports photographer for InsideThunder.com at NBA Thunder games in Oklahoma City. I had fallen in love with photography and really got to develop my skills in the fast paced environment of professional basketball.
Photography is a great way for me to work from home and to still indulge my creative side the way theatre did. I do miss working with my students, but now we have 5 children, and have moved back to Colorado, where both my husband and I grew up. Wedding photography is the career that gives me so much fulfillment as an artist and an entrepreneur. The flexibility of owning my own business allows me to prioritize the children and their wild schedules.
When I transitioned from sports photography to wedding photography, I never realized how many of my technical camera skills from the basketball world would be so applicable to the fleeting and spontaneous wedding day moments. I had no idea that I would care about my couples so much, and be emotionally invested in their wedding day experiences, the way that I cared for and committed to my theatre students. My education and theatrical background helps me put couples at ease and feel more comfortable in front of the camera, because I know how to support them and to help them be their authentic selves even in the very stage-like circumstance of a wedding day.
It is truly a privilege to get to work with the amazing people that I do, in such a beautiful and amazing place. I am very grateful.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
Perhaps not the business resilience that you are referring to, but as soon as I read this question, a specific day as a wedding photographer popped into my mind. I believe it demonstrates resilience in the face of unexpected adversity.
A couple of years ago, when I was 7 months pregnant with my youngest, I agreed to photograph a proposal for a tourist that was visiting with his girlfriend in February of that year. We have many incredible sites, including multiple waterfalls, here in Ouray, Colorado, but this couple had shared their first kiss at the Box Canyon Waterfall on a previous visit to the area. The gentleman that contacted me knew that was the spot he wanted to propose because it was so special to them.
He had asked for a bouquet of roses to be placed in the snow at the bottom of the waterfall on the ice area that builds up into a sort of platform in the winter. In the winter months we have a great deal of snow, and the parking area is inaccessible. You need to hike up the hillside and into the canyon. Then you walk down multiple flights of metal stairs to reach the bottom of the waterfall. I asked my husband to accompany me and help carry some of my camera gear and the bouquet of flowers. Being so pregnant, I knew that it would be difficult to make the hike in the snow.
A week before, we went to the site to scout out a good angle for photographing the moment. Due to the narrowness of the canyon, it is actually an impossible shot in the summer, but in the winter, there is thick ice that forms and allows you to stand out over the river to be able to see back toward the waterfall.
On the day of the proposal, after a bit of an arduous hike to the site, my husband went to set up the bouquet for me in the requested spot while I got my cameras ready. I began to go out onto the ice where I had found the proper angle the week before.
At all times of the year, this waterfall is intense. It rushes with such a force down into the canyon, and the rock walls are so close together, that it makes a pretty overwhelming amount of noise. Below the patchwork of ice on the surface, the river is deep and fast moving. I noticed that the ice looked a bit different than it had the week before, but didn’t think one week, in the middle of winter, would make that large of a difference in its stability. As I took a step out over the river, my feet immediately broke through the snow and ice and I went straight down. The camera on the left side of my body harness was completely under the water, with my legs. The camera in my right hand was safe, because always happen to walk with that one up by my chest for some reason. The cameras were the least of my concern at that moment.
I was submerged up to the bottom of my large pregnant belly. I am pretty certain that my belly is what kept me from falling all the way through. I’m sure that I probably let out a scream as I fell, but it was so incredibly loud down there that it would be impossible for my husband to have heard me from where he was. He also couldn’t see me from where he was, and didn’t know that I had been heading out to that spot yet.
My mind was racing with thoughts of what to do. Do I try to get out immediately because the rest of the ice around my belly could give way at any moment and I’ll be swept under into the river? Do I hold still and wait for him to find me because moving to try to get up might cause the ice to crack and I might also end up under the water? Did I mention that the water is super dark, which makes it even more terrifying. I was wearing snowpants, a coat, a camera harness, snow boots, and had two heavy cameras strapped to me. Would I be able to keep my head above the water if I went under? Would my husband even be able to find me if I went under? Would I get stuck under the ice and drown? I had a lot of thoughts in those immediate moments after I fell, and none were as unproductive as my attempt to compare my current predicament to what I learned from the movies about what to do when you fall into quicksand.
Thankfully, my husband came around the corner, saw me, and pulled me out of the water. Of course, we had no towels or change of clothes. Why would we? Of course, down in the canyon there is no cell service. Of course, this spot is also completely in the shade and the air temperature is even cooler, as if you are in a cave. My husband immediately scolded me for trying to go out on the ice and for not waiting until we looked at it together. Right after that, he insisted that we head home so that I could change and make sure that I didn’t get hypothermia.
All I could think about, while I recovered from the shock of what I had just done, was that I couldn’t ruin this moment for the couple. I didn’t have any cell service to tell my client, or to delay him. They were scheduled to be there in 5 minutes and it would take us at least 30 to walk back to our car, at least another 10 to get to the house and change, and then 30 more to hike back in. I knew that if I left now, it meant that my client wouldn’t get to propose in their special spot, or that he wouldn’t get to have photos of the moment. I couldn’t leave!
My husband was not pleased, but I promised to keep my body and my toes moving for circulation and warmth and that we would leave immediately after the proposal to change. They ended up being 20 minutes late. (That is the nature of proposals, because it is difficult to have something that is a surprise happen at a precise time.) I was so cold and starting to get worried that I’d made a terrible mistake worse by staying. My husband was getting pretty insistent that we should go. I did a crazy jig, with my one dry camera, until we heard them coming down the stairs above us. Thankfully, he proposed quickly. Afterward, we said hello, congratulated them, and explained that we needed to get out of there, because clearly, I was soaked.
I went home and changed, we met them again, and we had a great laugh about the whole thing. My camera did eventually dry out, and although I have since upgraded gear, it still works and is kept as a possible backup for the next time I do something incredibly dumb for the sake of the shot.
So I suppose that I was resilient in that moment…or the 20-30 moments after I had fallen into the stream of the winter waterfall. I was resilient in the name of commitment to my clients. I was resilient so that I could create a magical memory for my them. You can definitely say that I am “all in!” (Pun intended)
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
I think the mission driving my creative journey is the one illustrated in the waterfall story above. I am seriously invested in the outcome of my clients’ experiences. I want all of the things that they want for their day, because it is important to them. I will do everything in my power as a photographer to help them get what they are wishing for in their wedding experience and in the gallery of images that lets them remember it forever. I recently worked with a winter elopement couple, where the bride and I had a running joke that it was “also my elopement day” because I was so committed to helping them get over any of the hurdles that came our way. I even snowshoed up to multiple mountain locations with the children in tow, while we were planning, because our first few location options fell through due to avalanche issues. She and I would laugh and say, “for our wedding day let’s do this!” I am so thrilled that everything worked out perfectly for them and that they had an amazing wedding day. It was worth every minute of effort!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://sammurch.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sammurchphotography/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sammurchphotography
Image Credits
Sam Murch Photography