Bride trades engagement photoshoot to take photos with her dying dad instead

Bride swaps engagement photoshoot to take photos with dying dad

A Virginia photographer got an unexpected email from a bride who kept rescheduling her engagement photoshoot. The note lead to an especially meaningful photo opportunity. 

"So I know you probably think I am the biggest photo session flake in the whole world," the bride, Becky Carey, wrote in the email to Bonnie Turner Photography. "...My dad has been fighting prostate cancer and his body is now at the point where it can't handle more treatment."

Becky Carey asked a Virginia photographer if she could use the deposit for her engagement photoshoot to take photos with her ailing dad instead. Bonnie Turner Photography

Carey told photographer Bonnie Turner that her dad was going into hospice care and he wouldn't make it to her wedding. So they decided to do the father-daughter dance early, and wanted Turner to capture the special moment. Carey asked the photographer if she could use the engagement shoot deposit for a family photo session instead. 

Carey's dad was in hospice, but wanted to have his father-daughter dance with the bride before he passed.  Bonnie Turner Photography

"We haven't had professional family photos taken since my brother and I were little, and this would mean so much to us," Carey wrote. It was short notice, but Turner made sure she could do it for the family. 

"She knew he possibly wouldn't make it to walk her down the aisle or share that father-daughter dance on her wedding day," Turner wrote in a Facebook post recounting Carey's story. "So she took it upon herself to scratch those engagement photos for a while and share that father-daughter moment in the back yard where she grew up."

"Photographs and memories are EVERYTHING when they are all you have left," Bonnie wrote.

Carey and her dad are eternally grateful that the photographer knew how meaningful the photos would be. He has since passed away, but the bride got to have the father-daughter-dance she always dreamed of, and it's captured on film, thanks to Turner. 

"Photographs and memories are EVERYTHING when they are all you have left," the photographer said after doing a family photoshoot for the Careys. Bonnie Turner Photography
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