Engagement

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September 25, 2011 by scottmacdonaldweddings

Sunita & Brian’s Big Sur engagement photos

It’s hard to go wrong on a photo shoot in Big Sur. Still, it always helps to have great light, no matter where you go.

So it was with some trepidation that Sunita, Brian, Conner and I drove down a very foggy Highway 1 on our way to make their Big Sur engagement photos.

Sunita and Brian love Big Sur, as I do, and had at least one spot in mind for their engagement session. I had put a lot of pressure on myself to make this one great, since Sunita and Brian are friends with Leslie and Ryan, and all our mutual friends had been raving about their Big Sur engagement pictures, which I shot a couple months ago. Photographers are always judged by their past work, but when the past work involves close friends, well, let’s just say I didn’t want to disappoint.
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September 8, 2011 by scottmacdonaldweddings

Leslie & Ryan’s Big Sur engagement panoramas


Click and drag inside the panorama to look around.

During Leslie & Ryan’s Big Sur engagement photo session, I made a couple panoramic images. These are produced by shooting a series of photos in all directions, then using software to stitch them together for display online. Go ahead and click on a panorama to load it, then you can use your mouse to click inside and drag it around.

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July 29, 2011 by scottmacdonaldweddings

Leslie & Ryan’s Big Sur engagement photos

Moments before we left to shoot Leslie and Ryan’s Big Sur engagement photos, I sent them some instructions via text message: “Bring some extra socks and a towel that you don’t mind getting dirty.”

They probably wondered what they were getting themselves into. The foreshadowing led into a marathon engagement session, which included standing in a river, lying in a bed of clover and synchronized jumping on a beach to produce a stop-motion video.
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July 10, 2011 by scottmacdonaldweddings

Annie & Mike engagement

When deciding on a location for an engagement session, the first thing I do is ask the couple where they like to go: What are they into, what kind of places reflect who they are?

For Annie and Mike I didn’t have to ask: We’re old friends, and I knew that they’re true locals of Oldtown Salinas.

Mike and I have worked together at newspapers since my very first professional job as a reporter in 1996. We’ve got great old stories of the days when we were both learning the craft, sitting side by side in the small, stuffy newsroom of a daily paper in a tiny old Florida town. We’ve both gone many other places in our careers, but we ended up in Salinas, me running the photo department and Mike running the entire newsroom.
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May 27, 2011 by scottmacdonaldweddings

Bridget & Amadeo engagement

Bridget and Amadeo are planning a rock-and-roll themed wedding, so we did our best to add a touch of rock and roll to their engagement session: We shot outside of a couple punk clubs, we hopped a fence, we ended at a bar with a few pints.

Our locations were around downtown San Jose, all within walking distance of our houses. St. James Park, the post office, the court house, Circle of Palms Plaza. Amadeo kept us laughing by quoting funny lyrics and dropping the funniest pick-up line I’ve ever heard: ” You got a number to go with that face?” The talented Conner Jay came along to work my softbox-on-a-stick.

In the end, we came away with a great set of pictures and had a great time. If their San Francisco wedding is half as fun as their San Jose engagement session, we’re going to have a blast.
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May 23, 2011 by scottmacdonaldweddings

Christine & Chris engagement

When I was planning where to do an engagement session with Christine and Chris, we considered going to a park for hiking or a winery for wine tasting — but in the end we decided to combine the ideas, and hike to some wine tasting on a mountaintop.

We went to Henry Coe State Park near Morgan Hill on a sunny Sunday in late February. On our way to the park, we stopped for photos at a lake and a very pretty barn. But the real payoff was inside the park itself, where we found dramatic-looking trees silhouetted against deep blue skies. We even found a little snow sticking to the shadowy parts of the hilltops.
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