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.
There’s nothing a wedding photographer likes more than waking up on the morning of a wedding and seeing bright blue sunny skies. Jamie and Adam’s Salinas wedding had sun and blue skies in abundance, and the great weather lasted all day.
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.
It wasn’t until I was in my car heading south to photograph Kristie and Casey’s Big Sur wedding that I realized why they were having it on a Wednesday at the end of February … It was Leap Year day!
Silly of me, I know. But I was so excited about all the other details of the wedding that I didn’t dwell on the fact that it was on a weekday. The wedding was to be a small gathering, just a few people, in my favorite place on earth, Big Sur.
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.