I love engagements.
The portrait portion of the wedding day is my favorite, so engagements are just that — but with less stress and more casual clothes. I’m pretty adamant about wanting to collaborate with my clients. That is exactly what I got to do with this shoot.
Emily is a close friend of mine.
She holds a special place to me as it relates to my business. When I started years ago, I had been doing a lot of concert photography and was working for my college’s newspaper. I got good at documentary work. However, people terrified me. How on earth could I direct someone? I was so used to being the “fly on the wall” and not interacting with my subjects. When I decided to plunge into portraits, she was one of my first shoots. She was incredibly patient with me and has always let me do my own thing.
In the beginning, I was very much still finding my “voice.”
I really didn’t have my own style at that time, and throughout the years she and I would go on various shoots as I tried to bridge the gap between what I had in my head and what I wanted to produce. We would go back and forth with ideas, which made the process a lot less scary when I was starting out.
Fast forward to present day.
I’m much further into this and I feel like I have my own style and I’m shooting her engagement portraits. It feels both exciting and nostalgic. Before the shoot, we chatted through location ideas like we used to and both settled upon Arabia Mountain State Park. None of us had been there before, but it seemed like a perfect place to try something new. I also tried shooting with a Canon 50L, which I never do. I find that focal length incredibly uninspiring, but I love nothing more than a challenge — and this was the shoot to do it.
I’m kind of eating my own words here.
Most of this set was shot with the Canon 50L, and I was incredibly pleased with it. The bokeh has character and it’s pretty sensitive to flaring, which is nice. I tried a little bit of everything with them, and we got a lot done in just a couple hours. Emily and Hunter were amazing to work with, and I’m so excited for their wedding at Frost Chapel in the fall!
