A couple weeks before Renae & George’s engagement session, George called to run a crazy idea by me: What if we loaded the large wooden bench that he proposed on into the back of his truck and drove it at night to the First Street bridge, so they could sit on it for a picture with the Los Angeles skyline behind them?
“I love this idea,” I said.
Read More
They rode the bumper cars. The flying swings. Kissed on a Merry-Go-Round. Held hands on railroad tracks. Walked on the beach at sunset. Even got in a couple games of Skee-Ball.
Sounds like a great date. But it was Rosa & Adam’s engagement session at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk — the site of their actual first date.
When Matt and Shane told me they wanted to do their engagement session in San Francisco, they had a handful of ideas for locations: Coit Tower, the Palace of Fine Arts, Marin Headlands.
I told them I would figure out some other locations and set up a schedule for our day. But I neglected to tell them about the danger in letting me control the schedule: I got so excited about all the possibilities for beautiful engagement photos in San Francisco that my ambitious schedule led us to a nearly five-hour photo shoot.
During the first thirty minutes of Jamie and Adam’s engagement session, I found myself perched on top of a swingset, then laying on a tree branch, hanging over the side, taking pictures of them. I love when a couple has fun ideas for pictures that give me an excuse to have some fun of my own, so this engagement session was starting out great.
I love when I get to do something I’ve never done at any previous engagement session. In the case of Kaylene and Nils’ Monterey engagement session, the new thing was running barefoot in the Pacific Ocean.
When I first met with Veronica and Noe to talk about wedding photography, I asked Noe how he proposed. He said he asked Veronica to marry him on a mountaintop in Big Sur — which is the exact thing I did when I asked Amber to marry me. I knew we were going to get along great.
I also knew exactly where the engagement session had to be.
Ah, Monterey. It can be so beautiful — the rocky coast line, the wide sandy beaches, the sparkling bay.
It can also be so darn foggy.
On the evening I went with Athena and Anthony to make their Monterey engagement photos, the fog got progressively thicker, eventually turning into something close to a light rain. But that didn’t stop us from finding lots of great places to shoot and coming up with a wonderful set of engagement pictures.
Read More