Some photographers find the work. The work found Cheryl Mains and Joel Boily in a shopping-mall portrait studio, somewhere between a screaming toddler and an exhausted parent praying for one usable frame.
That is where the story of Black & Gold Photography actually begins — not with a grand artistic awakening, but with two people who met in 2008, dated, and spent their first three years together running a Sears Portrait studio as manager and assistant manager. Neither was a professional photographer. Neither had any intention of becoming one. What they had was a strange shared talent for coaxing a real smile out of a two-year-old while the clock ran and the parents unraveled. It turned out that getting people to relax in front of a lens is most of the job. They just didn't know it yet.
In 2010 they bought their first camera and named the company after a Sam Sparro song. Black & Gold, released in 2008, is a track about existentialism and contrast — light and dark, certainty and doubt, the material and the spiritual. At an event, cornered and asked about the name, they'll usually say it's a nod to Nikon's colours and leave it there. The real answer is that wedding photography lives entirely in contrast: not just light against shadow, but a fleeting moment against the mundane hours around it. To this day, when Joel nails a frame, he mutters "that's gold" to himself. Gold is the moment. Black is everything ordinary it's set against. The whole job is manufacturing gold on demand.
They booked their first wedding not long after, while still shooting families, events, and the occasional commercial job. By 2016 they were planning their own — a destination wedding in Mexico, a week-long party with everyone they loved. For the honeymoon they skipped the beach and flew to Iceland for a wedding photography workshop. That trip settled it. In 2018 they walked away from steady office jobs in sales and marketing and committed to weddings full time, then spent the next several years chasing workshops and conferences around the world to sharpen the craft.
Fifteen years in, the venue list reads like a tour of the province. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the Fort Garry Hotel, the Manitoba Club, Pineridge Hollow, Hawthorn Estates, the White Poplar, Inn at the Forks, Assiniboine Park, Birds Hill Park, The Leaf — plus breweries, restaurants, backyards, and what feels like every golf course and hotel Winnipeg has to offer. They've shot more Manitoba weddings, in more rooms, than almost anyone working today. You'd expect that kind of mileage to dull the enthusiasm. It hasn't. They still fall for every wedding day they're handed. For couples weighing where to actually get married, their work doubles as a field guide to the province's best wedding venues across Manitoba.
In 2021 they folded hybrid photography into the workflow, so couples who want a short film of the day can get one. And while weddings are the heart of it, the back catalogue runs deep: family, newborn, maternity, commercial, branding, and event work — the genres that paid the bills before weddings took over. They celebrate every kind of love, and have photographed queer and LGBTQI2+ weddings alongside traditional Indian, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, and Filipino celebrations, and plenty that defy a tidy label.
The jet-setting newlyweds-with-cameras version of Cheryl and Joel doesn't really exist anymore. Atlas arrived in 2020, the same week the world locked down — a forced, unexpected slowing-down that let them settle into parenthood while the calendar sat empty. Oslo came in 2022, two months early at four pounds, into a year that included daily NICU visits, major surgery for Cheryl, their first bout with COVID, and their busiest wedding season to date. They still say it plainly: if they survived that year, they can survive anything.
These days the glamour is mostly Blippi at 6 a.m. and bed by eight. But the business was always built around exactly this — a career that would let them be home with their kids during the years that matter most. By that measure, they've already won. The boys get a little sad when mom and dad have to work a Saturday, then demand to hear everything about the wedding when they get home.
Cheryl Mains grew up one of five siblings, all within a decade of each other, in a house full of music and dance. She was valedictorian at her French-immersion high school in Winnipeg and went on to earn a degree in Theatre Design from the University of Manitoba. She's a lifelong devotee of yoga and fitness, a connoisseur of reality television, and — by every account, including her own — the organizational engine of the operation. Her instinct for structure is the reason the business runs as cleanly as it does.
Joel Boily grew up between Steinbach and Winnipeg with a family history that strains belief: one grandfather founded the town of La Broquerie, served as its first mayor, hosted the royal family, and survived a kidnapping during a bank heist; another was a pioneer on the first voyage to establish Mennonite settlements in Paraguay that still thrive today. Joel's own first brush with fame came at age four, when he made the six o'clock news for accidentally burning down a St. Boniface apartment building. He found photography after a stint DJing weddings, recognized it as the meeting point of art and technology, and never looked back. If he's editing your photos, he's almost certainly laughing at a podcast while he does it.
Here's the thing this article is supposed to dance around, so let's not. In 2024, Joel founded Canadian Wedding Photographers — the very platform publishing this spotlight. Which makes this the only member feature on the site where the subject also signs off on the content. It's a strange thing to write about yourself in the third person, and stranger still to publish it. Joel has said more than once that he wishes someone would knock on his door and interview him about the thing he loves, the way he gets to do for the members. Nobody has. So consider this him taking his own medicine — with full acknowledgement that featuring the founder on the founder's platform is, at minimum, a little ridiculous.
What makes it land anyway is that Cheryl and Joel are exactly the kind of photographers the platform exists for: proactive, restlessly curious, fifteen years deep, and still genuinely in love with the work. The credential isn't the point. The proof is. And after several hundred Manitoba weddings, the proof speaks for itself.
Website: blackandgoldphotography.com
Instagram: @blackandgoldphotography
Facebook: Blackandgoldphotography
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