Laura-Anne Smid
/Laura-Anne Smid first took up photography as an undergrad at a liberal arts college, where students were required to take classes outside of their majors. “When I looked up art courses, I settled on photography,” Laura-Anne says, because “two of my siblings had taken the class and I'd heard it was an easy A, but I couldn't have known how pivotal it would end up being in my life! I fell in love with photography and (perhaps unhealthily) obsessed over wedding blogs once I found them, desperate to use my camera to capture pretty things.”
Within a year, she shot a friend’s wedding, and ultimately quit her job at a Christian non-profit to leap into photography full-time, booking three weddings within days of handing in her resignation. “It it was all God affirming my trust in Him,” she says. “It's been an adventure and a half ever since!”
In addition to her emotional, joy-filled images flooded with golden light, Laura-Anne seeks to provide practical and spiritual support for her Catholic clients every step of the way, offering encouragement, prayer, foil prints that evoke the permanence of gold wedding bands, and a podcast.
From Laura-Anne:
The ultimate goal in life is to get to heaven. That union with God—that marriage!—is worth all the refinement required in life to get there.
Marriage, living in such close quarters with someone and sharing your life so intimately with them, is a prime place to be refined. That purification, the stripping away of flaws and helping each other become more like pure gold, is some of the holiest work we can participate in. When we're at our worst, it's indescribably hard. When we're at our best, we're experiencing a foretaste of heaven, mirroring God's love to the world.
My desire in my mission is to give people reminders of the beauty in refinement on the road to heaven.
