Julie prepares to toss her bouquet during her reception at Hamilton's 110 North East in Jacksonville.
Julie said we could pass this on . . .
Steve and Tiffany,
After a whirlwind 10 days or so, I was finally able to sit down and look over all the wedding pictures…tears are streaming down my face. They are simply amazing! You captured so many moments – things I never saw or noticed that day, stories and people I might have forgotten about, and feelings that I do remember very clearly and never want to forget. You helped tell the story of our wedding so beautifully and that means to the world to me!
I know you stayed longer than you had to, and did much more than take our pictures. This might be the way you run your business, but it really made us feel special. Tiffany, thank you for all your help – fixing my bustle, providing everything in that amazing emergency kit of yours, and being so attentive to all my bridesmaids. Audrey even commented that she wanted you to stay and hang out at whatever time you could stop taking pictures! You are such a great person.
Steve, as you probably remember, Phil is not much of a picture person. Therefore, I knew he wouldn’t be as moved as I was to see the pictures from last Saturday. But you did get a reaction out of him that was pretty cool. He said you “were everywhere” and several times mentions that he had no idea you were around for pictures like the ones taken before we entered Hamilton’s and some of those taken in the library. You really were everywhere – quietly going about capturing the best day of our lives.
Call me an emotional new bride, but I can’t thank you enough for the wonderful pictures, and for being so affordable. I’m sure we’ll be in touch in the coming weeks or month about what’s next and how to order. Until then, I will be clicking through all of them repeatedly, feeling sort of like a celebrity on your website 🙂
Thanks again,
Julie Wilkinson
Thanks for the kind words Julie!
Julie and Phil walk down the aisle after their ceremony at First Christian Church in South Jacksonville.
Steve and Tiffany,
After a whirlwind 10 days or so, I was finally able to sit down and look over all the wedding pictures…tears are streaming down my face. They are simply amazing! You captured so many moments- things I never saw or noticed that day, stories and people I might have forgotten about, and feelings that I do remember very clearly and never want to forget. You helped tell the story of our wedding so beautifully and that means to the world to me!
I know you stayed longer than you had to, and did much more than take our pictures. This might be the way you run your business, but it really made us feel special. Tiffany, thank you for all your help – fixing my bustle, providing everything in that amazing emergency kit of yours, and being so attentive to all my bridesmaids. Audrey even commented that she wanted you to stay and hang out at whatever time you could stop taking pictures! You are such a great person.
Steve, as you probably remember, Phil is not much of a picture person. Therefore, I knew he wouldn’t be as moved as I was to see the pictures from last Saturday. But you did get a reaction out of him that was pretty cool. He said you “were everywhere” and several times mentions that he had no idea you were around for pictures like the ones taken before we entered Hamilton’s and some of those taken in the library. You really were everywhere- quietly going about capturing the best day of our lives.
Call me an emotional new bride, but I can’t thank you enough for the wonderful pictures, and for being so affordable. I’m sure we’ll be in touch in the coming weeks or month about what’s next and how to order. Until then, I will be clicking through all of them repeatedly, feeling sort of like a celebrity on your website 🙂
Thanks again,
Julie WilkinsonSteve and Tiffany,
After a whirlwind 10 days or so, I was finally able to sit down and look over all the wedding pictures…tears are streaming down my face. They are simply amazing! You captured so many moments- things I never saw or noticed that day, stories and people I might have forgotten about, and feelings that I do remember very clearly and never want to forget. You helped tell the story of our wedding so beautifully and that means to the world to me!
I know you stayed longer than you had to, and did much more than take our pictures. This might be the way you run your business, but it really made us feel special. Tiffany, thank you for all your help – fixing my bustle, providing everything in that amazing emergency kit of yours, and being so attentive to all my bridesmaids. Audrey even commented that she wanted you to stay and hang out at whatever time you could stop taking pictures! You are such a great person.
Steve, as you probably remember, Phil is not much of a picture person. Therefore, I knew he wouldn’t be as moved as I was to see the pictures from last Saturday. But you did get a reaction out of him that was pretty cool. He said you “were everywhere” and several times mentions that he had no idea you were around for pictures like the ones taken before we entered Hamilton’s and some of those taken in the library. You really were everywhere- quietly going about capturing the best day of our lives.
Call me an emotional new bride, but I can’t thank you enough for the wonderful pictures, and for being so affordable. I’m sure we’ll be in touch in the coming weeks or month about what’s next and how to order. Until then, I will be clicking through all of them repeatedly, feeling sort of like a celebrity on your website 🙂
Thanks again,
Julie WilkinsonSteve and Tiffany,
After a whirlwind 10 days or so, I was finally able to sit down and look over all the wedding pictures…tears are streaming down my face. They are simply amazing! You captured so many moments- things I never saw or noticed that day, stories and people I might have forgotten about, and feelings that I do remember very clearly and never want to forget. You helped tell the story of our wedding so beautifully and that means to the world to me!
I know you stayed longer than you had to, and did much more than take our pictures. This might be the way you run your business, but it really made us feel special. Tiffany, thank you for all your help – fixing my bustle, providing everything in that amazing emergency kit of yours, and being so attentive to all my bridesmaids. Audrey even commented that she wanted you to stay and hang out at whatever time you could stop taking pictures! You are such a great person.
Steve, as you probably remember, Phil is not much of a picture person. Therefore, I knew he wouldn’t be as moved as I was to see the pictures from last Saturday. But you did get a reaction out of him that was pretty cool. He said you “were everywhere” and several times mentions that he had no idea you were around for pictures like the ones taken before we entered Hamilton’s and some of those taken in the library. You really were everywhere- quietly going about capturing the best day of our lives.
Call me an emotional new bride, but I can’t thank you enough for the wonderful pictures, and for being so affordable. I’m sure we’ll be in touch in the coming weeks or month about what’s next and how to order. Until then, I will be clicking through all of them repeatedly, feeling sort of like a celebrity on your website 🙂
It was a blast covering Megan (Knocke) and Adam Wardlow’s wedding in Quincy this January. They had fun the whole day, and we’ve never seen so many people jamming the dance floor.
After their wedding we met to help plan their coffee table book. We asked for some feedback on our work, and Adam said hiring us was the “best decision ever.” Wow. What a compliment! It was our pleasure. And, I suppose you mean the best decision besides marrying Megan.
Their wedding was our first in Quincy. We’re located in Jacksonville and do most of our weddings here and in Springfield. But, we do many events in Chicago, St. Louis, and all around the state. We’re looking forward to our next wedding in Quincy this autumn, and hopefully many more in the future.
Megan & Adam Wardlow exit the church after their ceremony in Quincy.
This month marks my first full year of “retirement” from the Jacksonville Journal-Courier. Before leaving the daily grind of the daily paper, I worked 11 years in Jacksonville, two years at the Herald & Review (Decatur, Illinois), two years at the Freeport Journal-Standard, and 4 months at the LaSalle-Peru News-Tribune (the home of half-time overtime, ask me about it sometime). While at the University of Illinois-Urbana, I was a photographer and photo editor for the Daily Illini. I took a summer and fall off to intern at newspapers in Saginaw and Muskegon, Michigan.
People have asked me if I miss working at the newspaper. Honestly, not in the least. I see my years in newspapers as a past chapter of my life. And, I’m using all the experience and skill from that time to do something I absolutely enjoy — telling wedding stories for our brides and grooms.
(Tiffany left the newspaper earlier to start our wedding photography business. She did all the “work” while I just joined her for the fun of photographing on Saturdays. We now are happy working as a team for our wedding clients. When you add our years together we have more than 30 years of experience as photojournalists.)
A little something about the photo atop our blog. Tiffany & I had a wonderful honeymoon in Sweden. We were married 15 September (the week of 9/11), and took a three-week trip to Sweden the next summer. I was lucky enough to have visited Sweden for five-and-a-half weeks the previous year as part of a Rotary Club Group Study Exchange (if you’re a young professional and can take an extended leave from your job, I highly suggest applying for the program).
New friends invited us to come visit, so we did! We stayed a week in Malmö with our friend Martin Israelsson; another week with our friends Bengt Josefsson and Ann Wilhelmsson at their home in Mariestad and their stuga (summer home) in Sisjön; and a final week in Stockholm. Bengt was the trigger man for our blog photo. We were visiting the small village of Hjo on the shores of Lake Vättern, when I saw the cool setting. I set the camera up, told Bengt not to put us in the middle, and we posed for the shot. Not bad for an accountant! And, a great remembrance of a place whose slogan is I love Hjo (pronounced “you”).
By the way, we suggest taking a pre-honeymoon followed by a full-fledged honeymoon. We went to Southern Illinois and stayed in cabins at the San Damiano Retreat Center a couple days after our wedding, then were able to take our longer honeymoon trip to Sweden. That way we could use vacation time from work to help prepare for the wedding and to settle things afterwards before our pre-honeymoon. Then our honeymoon could be longer and at a time when there was less to worry about and we had more energy.
Steve & Tiffany on their Honeymoon in Sweden. (Photo by Bengt Josefsson)
So you and your fiancé go through your list of family and friends and choose who will stand up with you at your wedding. Then, you ask two or three more buddies to be a part of your day and serve as ushers.
But somehow, the ushers always seem to get a bit jealous when they don’t get to be in all the pictures. “Ushers, can you please get in the group.” And they start to grumble.
Tiffany and I picked up on a fun comment at Megan (Knoche) and Adam Wardlow’s wedding in Quincy this January. We now refer to ushers as “special teams.” The game is at a critical juncture — who do you call in to get the hard, dirty job done? That’s right, special teams.
The guys love it. I guess it makes them feel special.
Julie (Surratt) Wilkinson was gracious enough to share her special day with her bridesmaid, Audrey Zeilman. It was Audrey’s birthday, and to mark the occasion she surprised her with a delivery from Leo’s Pizza! A neat idea and a great way to celebrate their history together.
Photos from the wedding are uploading now! Go to the Warmowski Photography web site, click on “See proofs from your event” and click on Julie & Phil’s name to see the images on Thursday.
Julie Wilkinson celebrates the birthday of her bridesmaid, Audrey, with a Jacksonville specialty — a pizza from Leo's.Audrey reacts to the special delivery.
Turning the guests into a band to celebrate the marriage of Julie & Phil Wilkinson.
He’s a music man! A Wilkinson family tradition is to gather all the family, friends and guests around the dance floor and create a band — à la Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man — to serenade Julie and Phil, the new bride and groom.
The crowd was split up into piccolos, pianos, harps, drums and the like and performed under the direction of Phil’s Uncle Mike. He ended the performance with a swan dive off a chair — good thing Phil is a chiropractor, for he probably needed an adjustment in the morning.
Photo details: We like setting up lights around the dance floor to add more depth to the scene. We always try to use available light, but sometimes when it’s lacking we add our own. Just another way we at Warmowski Photography like to add a little extra to our wedding photography.
Event details: Hamilton’s 110 North East for catering and reception, State Street Bridal for wedding dress, flowers by Ashley’s Petals & Angels, D.J. Joe Kindred (Jacksonville, Illinois).
Riding in many a limo with our wedding parties, I can report the biggest difficulty is trying to figure out how to get the radio to work.
You get in the limo, then you see this thing that requires a computer programming degree to get it to play a CD. So you end up listening to a pop station, and that means commercials and usually a dearth of party music.
Here’s a two-prong suggestion for everyone:
1) Make a mix CD – get the music you’d want to party to, and burn a couple copies for the big day (so there’s a better chance it’ll make it into the limo for the ride).
2) Task a groomsman or usher with figuring out the radio and loading the CD. While you’re doing your receiving line, signing your wedding license and all the post-wedding fun, he can prime the limo with music.
This way everyone can relax after the ceremony and you can start your party with your best friends!
Thank goodness Julie Surratt & Phil Wilkinson only were outside for a little bit yesterday, for the buffalo gnats were crazy!
What’s a buffalo gnat? They’re these little black flies with a surprisingly big bite. You end up with a welt, and if you’re allergic even worse. When we moved to Jacksonville about 12 years ago, the gnats were not much of a problem. Only in the past few years have the swarms been something to consider.
Julie, an Illinois College alumna, wanted to stop on campus after the wedding to get some photos. A couple steps from the parking lot, as the wedding party walked past Sturtevant Hall, they were swarmed by gnats. We took a couple of quick photos, but there was more evading than posing. (Even worse, poor IC had their commencement outside the next day.)
This morning I was chatting with Pat Ward, an avid birder from Murrayville, who said the larval stages of the gnats come from local waterways. In years past pollution and silt meant fewer of the larval gnats survived, but now that streams and rivers are cleaner the gnats are making a comeback. He said frontier Illinois pioneers told of clouds of buffalo gnats driving horses crazy, and chickens would get suffocated (that happened two years ago to area chicken breeder Phil Bartz).
The University of Illinois suggests using DEET, but what I’ve found to work is vanilla. A bit of vanilla-scented lotion, or spray, or even the extract keeps the little buggers away.
Last year Lisa & David Jamiolkowski had their wedding at the end of May at Pere Marquette Lodge near Grafton, Illinois. We visited the lodge a couple days before the wedding and the gnats were bad, and we suggested Lisa & David to be prepared. They had spray bottles of vanilla on hand just in case. But, thankfully, the swarms disappeared right before their wedding. (The bugs die off after the water gets up to a certain temperature.)
So if you’re planning a wedding in Central Illinois in May, and you’re planning to have events outside, make some contingency plans for those pesky gnats.
As soon as Julie and Phil’s wedding party got out of the limo to take photos at Illinois College, they were swarmed by buffalo gnats.
Last year at Pere Marquette State Park, Lisa and David had some of their friends spray vanilla to ward off gnats.
