Who We Are
Kyo is a photographer. Janna is a writer and designer. (And we have two junior team members. One is a cartwheeler, the other is a truck enthusiast.)
We specialize in natural, documentary-style wedding and lifestyle photography and simple, modern album design.
We love working with down-to-earth couples who share our passions: food, travel, art, design, the outdoors, mountain biking, and DIY.
We are not a wedding photography studio who does heavy post-processing on their images. We like the classic film look. Personality-wise, we are low-key and pretty mellow.
Tell us your story!
Meet Kyo
I was born and raised in Japan. After I graduated from high school, I was looking for something fun and meaningful to do. So I came to the U.S., even though I wasn’t sure what I would find and I didn’t speak any English. I took English classes at a community college and eventually decided to go to art school in Washington D.C. I met Janna around the time when I graduated with my B.F.A. in photography, and we moved to New York City together.
I started off shooting street and documentary photography. The reason why I love that kind of photography is because I love to capture moments in time and people’s emotions. As it turns out, that works really well for wedding photography.
My favorite part of the job is meeting new people and learning about their families and backgrounds and culture. I love to work with laid-back, friendly people who have a sense of adventure. And I love to work in interesting places. Some of my favorite wedding locations have been the Swiss Alps, rural India, the highlands in central Costa Rica, the ancient Heian Temple in Kyoto, city streets in NYC, and a farm in southern Virginia. I love the outdoors and I try to incorporate nature into my photography as much as possible.
Meet Janna
A few months after we met, Kyo and I moved to New York City together. He wanted to pursue his craft by learning from great photographers, and I wanted to break into children’s book publishing. After some years went by, though, we realized that we weren’t completely happy. I spent much of my time in a corporate environment that didn’t feel quite right to me, and Kyo wasn’t thrilled with the administrative burden of building a photography business.
In 2010 we took the plunge. I quit my job and Kyo stopped freelancing for other studios to concentrate on our business. It hasn’t always been easy, but it has been more rewarding than we ever could have imagined. We have learned so much about each other and about ourselves, have faced and overcome big challenges, and have met so many wonderful people along the way. In the end, we create things that bring so much happiness, even tears of joy to people’s eyes. We feel lucky to be making our living by being creative and making art about people and the friends and family they love.
Our Love Story
by Janna
I first met Kyo on April Fool’s Day in 2001. A friend of mine invited me to a group show of young artists in Washington, DC. As I wandered through it, I came upon a photograph that made me pause: a picture of a man and a young boy striding down a sidewalk in Greenwich Village, deeply engrossed in conversation. I loved the feeling of connection between generations and being utterly in the moment captured in that photograph. I decided to buy it.
After searching the gallery for the photographer, someone pointed me to a guy named Kyo. I paid him for it and started to leave, but he came after me, calling, ‘Wait!’ I turned around, and he handed me another copy.
‘Take this one,’ he said. ‘It’s a better print. And would you sign my guestbook?’
I signed his book, and the next day, there was an email in my inbox, asking if I might want to see more of his photographs sometime. A week later, we met in a park, looked at lots more photos, visited an arboretum, had dinner together, and talked late into the night. Basically, we haven’t been apart since then.
We’d love to be part of your love story!
Where We Work
We are based in our home studio in central New Jersey. It’s a fantastic location that gives us easy access to a diverse and exciting metropolitan area. Close to our homebase, we often shoot weddings in:
- Brooklyn
- Manhattan
- Princeton
- Jersey City
- Short Hills
- Lawrenceville
- New Hope
- Philadelphia
- The Hamptons
- The Hudson Valley
- Greenwich
- The Poconos
- Spring Lake
- Asbury Park
…and so many other spots in the NYC region.
Destination Weddings
In the U.S., we’ve done destination weddings everywhere from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin to Washington DC to Maine.
International destination weddings and portraits have taken us to Bologna, Italy; the Czech Republic; Jaipur, India; Osaka and Kyoto in Japan; and St. Moritz, Switzerland.
