When taking, choosing, and editing photos, there is usually some sort of battle between the photographer in us and the human in us … and at least in weddings the human should often in the battles.

This isn’t even the cleanest composition that we took in that one-minute period … but it’s the one that makes me tear up as I look at it, and we think that is more important.

One of the clearest surprises when we looked through our own wedding photos was that things we might have thought of as clutter when looking at someone else’s photos were extremely interesting and important when we knew all the people. To you, the people on the left are blobs — to the bride, they are some of the most important people in her life.

But it’s Mom’s expression that gets me, and speaks to another lesson in empathy we’ve had in recent years.

Parenthood? Woah.

Being a Dad is about as hard as I thought being a Mom would be. And motherhood is a physical and emotional endurance course like nothing I’ve ever seen.

Weddings are important enough to hire a photographer for not just because you dress nice and bought flowers, but because of the lifetimes of relationships they represent, before and after the day. I don’t know what it was like to raise and care and know Matthew the way a Mom would … but for a split-second I get a glimpse.