We’re Laura and Karl - friends, photographers, and owners of Lila.  We are both experienced wedding photographers with our own unique stories and we have a ton of fun working together.  We began shooting together in 2015 and were running ourselves ragged separately shooting 100+ weddings a year. So we teamed up to bring a shared vision to life in a boutique, personalized service. We now limit the number of weddings we take per year to 20, allowing us to give each client the time and creativity they deserve.   

Lila is about connecting personally with our clients, and it’s about you not just seeing your images, but feeling your images.  

We specialize in seamlessly blending photojournalism and timeless editorial imagery, and we focus on capturing moments: the emotional, the romantic, the hilarious, and the wild moments.  We are passionate, laid back photographers who will guide you when you need it, but also love to go with the flow and let the day unfold.  Most of all, we want you to feel comfortable, enjoy your wedding and trust us to capture you at your best, most authentic self.   

Laura leads our Knoxville, TN team and Karl leads our Southern California team! We also love destination weddings! Let's Chat!

Laura loves backpacking through big mountains, trail running, travel, adventure, dogs, and ALL the baked goods. She and her husband entered into their biggest adventure of all in 2021 with the birth twins!  She's also a branding and advertising photographer.  Karl loves soccer (GOOOOALL!! Bayern Munich!), beach life, and running (but not as much as Laura though he can currently run farther. Thanks twins.) He is also a musician and composer and loves exploring nature with his son. 

Why "Lila"?

In short, Lila is the German word for purple. How'd we get there? 

When we were coming up with business names, we needed something that represented both of us. Someone mentioned combining our names (you know like celebrity couples!) but we aren't a couple and something about Kaura or Larl or Vercasner just wasn't working... So we started to dig deeper. 

When we edit weddings in Lightroom we use color codes to mark images for various reasons because you can then sort thousands of imagoes quickly - red for previews, yellow for 'needs additional editing", etc.  Over the years we would mark all of our absolute favorite wedding images in purple, and this purple collection quickly represented our ideal creative vision and lead to the decision to form a partnership and new business with an exclusive clientele that would share our vision.  Those purple files now live in our Lila portfolio.  We were playing around with business names involving the word "purple" and weren't loving any so we decided to try other languages. We are individually dutch and German so we started there.  The dutch word for purple is "purper" and the German word is Lila.  The choice was clear, and Lila was born!