Throwback 2012 | Munich Wedding Photographers | Michael and Carina Photography

Today we thought we’d share one of the last weddings we photographed in a small town just outside of Munich, Germany, all the way back in early 2012…
Sometimes we miss how the average, small town German church just happened to have the 500 year old interior that could have been taken straight out of a fairytale wedding.
Silvia and Armin were an awesome couple to work with. We approached their wedding with much more emphasis on photojournalism than the mix of fine art portraiture and photojournalism that we try to bring to every wedding now.

There’s a bit of a backstory to this wedding too.

Carina and I knew we wanted to start taking wedding photography seriously, and to do that, we’d need to invest in some professional equipment.

We had also been saving some money on the side for a trip to India as trips were so inexpensive from Germany.

With the money we’d put aside for India, we decided to purchase some equipment – a 5D Mark II and a 70-200 II lens, as well as some lighting equipment, from Andrew Gasser, a seller on Amazon.

That’s a lot of money – especially as the Mark IIs were much more expensive then. We’ll let you do the math.

Here’s a tip which we should have known, but didn’t.

If any Amazon seller ever contacts you via email and asks for a direct transfer, don’t do it. 

We did.

Our lenses never came and we lost all of our money. Thousands and thousands of dollars just… gone.

I think I spent an entire day in a fetal position when I realized what had happened. Carina and I were so discouraged.

No refund from Amazon as the money was transferred off of their site – no help from the police as “anything under 10,000 euros isn’t worth investigating when it comes to internet fraud.”

This all happened right before we were about to shoot this wedding.

We felt pretty down. I mean, really down.

We had equipment to shoot this wedding that was coming up, but still… we doubted if we should even continue with photography after that. It just hit us really hard.

I (Mike) was still teaching at the time, and someone told my mentor, the daughter of one of my students, what had happened.

She showed up at class a week before the wedding she knew we were about to shoot. She brought a bagful of her own equipment and pushed it into my hands.

“I believe in you two. You can do this. You can come back from this.”

It’s amazing the effect little moments like that can have on our lives.

Marion Hogl inspired us to keep doing what we do today.

If you’re out there and you are doubting yourself, don’t think that we haven’t all been there at some point.

We’ll doubtless all be there again.

But for what’s worth… you can do this. Your greatest moment is rising when you fall… heard that somewhere once from a certain friend.

We photographed the wedding and it was the last wedding we photographed before we realized- yes, we love what we do and yes, we’re going to do it full time.

Without those words of encouragement, I sometimes wonder if we would have pursued photography full time in America.

To start off their reception, Silvia and Armin sawed a log in two – a Bavarian country tradition.
It’s good to go back and see where we started and how far we’ve come.

And by the way – a big discount to anyone who wants to book us to shoot a wedding in that church again!

xoxo Michael & Carina