Like many, I turned to JDate hoping to find my soul mate. For years I hopped on and off the service meeting many wonderful people, but not that special “one.” Then I noticed a profile with a tiny, almost indiscernible photo. I would have skipped past it except for the very specific details about her likes and past activities. She highlighted in her profile exactly why we had so much in common. An avid outdoorsman, I was looking for someone to share my passion for trekking, travel and exploration. Jennifer didn’t just say that she liked to hike and travel, but listed where she had been and the hikes she completed. And so, unable to tell if I was attracted to her by her picture, I figured I would contact her, if nothing else, to gain a friend who shared similar passions.

When I met Jennifer, her vague photo didn’t do her justice. She was stunning without trying to be. However, it wasn’t just her looks, but her personality that won me over. She was a doer not just a talker. Within weeks we knew we each had found the right one. In fact, after years of not dating someone for more than two months, I proposed before we’d even been dating for nine months. This lead to a problem:

Where should two world travelers get married? As a part-time professional photographer I wanted epic photos of our wedding and my beautiful bride. We both wanted to be married somewhere off the beaten path and where neither of us had been before.  Although it started as a joke, Easter Island kept topping the list.

Flying thousands of miles off the coast of South America was just the beginning of our journey. We didn’t have a specific location for our nuptials and planned to find the most spiritual place on the island for the ceremony. This turned out to be the crater of a volcano where the island’s mysterious stone Maui were quarried. As you can imagine, this required a rather sturdy wedding dress. My soon to be wife was well prepared, however, as she found a one-of-a-kind dress in a Maggie Sottero Destinations gown. It held up great; so great, in fact, that I asked my wife to don it again for sunrise and sunset photographs.

After our wedding, we returned to our lives as academics, but didn’t sit still for long. That summer we spent a month trekking in the Alps and another month traversing China. We decided to take the dress with us and continue to take photographs of my wife in it. When people happened upon our shoots they initially thought they accidently stumbled into a wedding. However, to our surprise, once they found out what we were doing they were even more excited.

This sparked the goal to see just how far our project could reach. To date, we’ve traveled across six continents, the length of over 100,000 miles, to photograph Jennifer in 91 different locations.  Our book, One Dress, One Woman, One World was published in November and is available from us at www.onedressonewoman.com or at www.Amazon.com.

If you would like to see photographs from the book, and our continued adventure, please check out our website. 

Jennifer and Jeff
Medford, New Jersey