Brilliant Photographer Creates Wedding Album That Helps Blind Bride To Actually “See” Her Wedding Photos

James Day is a photographer based in Sydney who has captured more than 600 weddings during his career

However, despite his many years of experience as a photographer, James still faces his fair number of challenges. One of which came about when he met a young bride by the name of Stephanie.

Stephanie was all set to marry her beloved fiance Rob. However, unlike most of James’ bride clients, Stephanie, was blind.

You see, Stephanie suffers from cone-rod dystrophy, which is a disorder she inherited from her mother. As a child, like most of us young ladies, she had spent hours planning her very own perfect, dream wedding… but not that she had lost her vision, she’d understandably grown pessimistic about the idea.

“It was since Steph was a little girl. She wanted her fairy-tale wedding. And we were so sad when she said that she didn’t think she could do it,”  Stephanie’s mother recalled.

And so, James wanted to go above and beyond to commemorate the moment for his latest client.

He said:

“I Googled, I asked everyone I knew… for 12 months I pondered this idea. I played through the day in my mind 1,000 times. I thought of all the moments where I could potentially rob Steph of having a real moment.”

James began his mission by teaming up with Lemon Tree Film House, which is a company who makes one-of-a-kind wedding videos.

Together, they worked to create an incredible multi-sensory experience that Stephanie would never be able to forget.

According to science, smells and scents really do trigger intense memories thanks to the structure of our brains. The human olfactory bulbs (which is where smells are processed) is connected to an area called the amygdala (aka the brain’s emotional center) as well as the hippocampus (no… not the animal, this is the brain’s memory center).

Because of this connection, smell is literally one of the easiest ways to trigger our emotional memories – and so clever James decided to take full advantage of this effect.

James used ten fabrics which were infused with different essential oils.

His plan was simple: during the day, James would present the various fabrics to Stephanie, so that she could learn to associate the smell with that particular moment of her day.

“Unbelievably, later that night, Linda [Stephanie’s mom] was actually smelling and touching those fabrics and could already recall every single scent and the moment it correlated to,” he gushed.

And then, when it came time to print the photos, he also used a technique which made certain areas of the photograph rise.

These ‘tactile photos’ would then allow Steph to be to actually “see” the pictures in the same way somebody reads braille.

(AH – MAY- ZING)

Here is a selection of some of the amazing raised photographs James created for Steph and Rob:

“Inlaid in the album were the 10 pieces of fabrics which had been handed to them on their wedding day, along with 10 crystal bottles containing the corresponding essential oils, James’ photos that matched that scene and audio snippets we captured during those moments of the day too, so that they were literally transported back to their day in every way possible,’ Lemon Tree Film House told My Modern Met.

“Needless to say, they were absolutely overcome with emotion.”

And who could freakin’ blame them!?

And as if ALL THAT wasn’t enough, shortly after Steph and Rob’s wedding, the family was then invited to a highly emotional screening of their very own wedding video, produced by Lemon Tree Film House themselves.

Well, folks, I don’t want to give too much away, just make sure you have a good amount of tissues on hand for this next part. Lemon Tree Film House also suggests that you close your eyes in order ‘to experience (the moment) just as audibly as Steph did”

Watch the entire, incredibly emotional moment for yourselves below!

So, what did you think? Have you stopped crying yet? Well, good luck because I’ve been crying since I first heard this story a week ago. What an incredible effort it was from James to make sure that Steph and Rob had the most memorable, incredible day as possible. Be sure to share this with your friends and family to pass on the beautiful, inspirational feeling! x

All images credited to James Day Photography

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