Why We Chose Bill McCullough

We were once in your shoes—newly engaged, excitedly planning our wedding, and overwhelmed by the vast array of Austin wedding photographers who offered their services. Of all of the aspects of our wedding, how we would document and preserve the memory of the occasion was one of the most important to us.

Weddings are truly once-in-a-lifetime events, something experienced in a single setting and with a very personally selected group of people. They demand the hand of a photographic artist who can properly capture the nuances of the event, which can otherwise quickly evaporate from memory. We knew that our wedding would be special, beautiful, and memorable, that people would dance, drink, and be merry, that our friends and family would gather together in an unprecedented way, and that we would emerge from the event different than we arrived. When we contemplated the gravity of our nuptials and the celebration we were planning, one of our greatest concerns was that we would never be able to capture the true meaning of the occasion—that sense of personal expression, family, friendship, love, and commitment—in mere photographs.

By chance, we stumbled across an exquisitely bound book of wedding photos by Bill McCullough. At this point, we had scrutinized hundreds of wedding photos and dozens of photographers’ portfolios, and they generally looked the same—bride posing to the left and to the right, bride and groom holding hands in the garden, and bridesmaids and groomsmen standing shoulder to shoulder. Bill McCullough’s work stood out—when we saw his prints, we instantly knew that he was a different kind of wedding photographer. There were of course smiling faces (just like in other wedding photos), but we also witnessed a story being told in a visual sense, the wedding unfolding moment by beautiful moment. Bill’s photos, like no other photos we had ever seen before, expressed every significant detail, both seen and unseen—the beautiful, the comic, the ironic, the ethereal, the intangible, the miraculous—it was all there.

For us, the choice was easy. We wanted to document our wedding story, not simply have ourselves photographed. The photos that Bill gave us are more than wedding pictures—they document our happiness, our joy, our faith, our anticipation, our anxiety, our exhilaration, our family, our friendships, and our love. They tell the story of our wedding—of us, our guests, the ceremony, and its surroundings in a unique, creative, and personal way. Looking back, we feel so fortunate for being introduced to Bill—it truly gave us the perspective to understand the importance of artistic wedding photography, and we now intimately understand the compelling differences that set his work apart from others.

We have to admit that we are spoiled by Bill and his amazing wife, Meredith—a master bookbinder who designs, crafts, and produces the final photographic compilation in museum-quality binding, and guides you through each step of the process in selecting from an impressive and unique selection of font types, colors, and material types. We now have two children, and we are fortunate to have Bill as our family photographer as well. We cannot think of any better way to document our family’s growth and journey than with Bill’s keen eye, infectious humor, and natural artistry. To us, Bill McCullough is not just a wedding photographer or a family photographer. He is a storyteller, a journalist, an artist, and a friend who happens to be very skilled with a camera.

Lisa Tsai and Timothy Notzon
Married June 28, 2008 at Laguna Gloria
Austin, Texas