What can be better than a Christmas Engagement?  

Maybe a visit from your sweetheart that you haven’t seen in several months due to lockdown AND and engagement!

Evan and Maridyn met at college, and each traveled home last spring. But home for them is miles apart from one another. Two different countries, and closed borders meant the possibility of a visit was not even a consideration and they missed each other immensely. Fortunately for this sweet couple,  Christmas came early when she was able to finally make the trip to the states and he didn’t waste any time proposing. 

We were thrilled to have the opportunity to do their engagement portrait session before she returned home and what a fun afternoon we had with the two of them.  We traveled to a favorite local destination with a beautiful country setting, mountainscapes, and scenic farm backdrops with historic barns and outbuildings, a beautiful creek, tall grasses, and a plethora of trails to choose from that include a variety of choices for portrait backdrops. 

This session was extra special for us. We have known Evan and his family for many years and he was a student for a couple of years in a youth choir I directed. Over the years we have done their family portraits, and I did a few senior portraits for him just a few short years ago. We love people. We enjoy meeting new clients and we always have a great time doing sessions with every single family, individual, and couple. When you have history with people it makes the session extra fun and special.  This session incorporated both. We enjoyed meeting Maridyn and spending the afternoon with them. You can see their genuine friendship and obvious love for one another in each one of these portraits. We can’t decide which ones are our favorites. We just love them all and we couldn’t be happier for them.

As photographers this whole shelter at home time has inspired us to a greater level of creativity. Techniques we haven’t experimented with are fun to learn and lately we’ve had more time to explore some fun things with light. We created a simple studio setting, which is something we have wanted to do for a while. Time at home has afforded us the ability to work on that project and this offers more opportunity to try some fun lighting techniques. Last week we experimented with smoke and lights as we created a backdrop for an airsoft war, and this week our fellow photographer and friend, Tony, at AJL Images,  worked with us on a light painting technique.  Our son, Levi, helped out spinning light, and had a great time in the process. This is something we’ve never done before and it was really fun! 

Note: It’s very easy to observe a six foot  distancing rule when you’re doing portraits,(Naturally  we often shoot from even more than six feet) so in case anyone wonders,social distancing was easily achieved.  😉

Now, sit back and enjoy the show! We hope you enjoy this project as much as we enjoyed creating it.

Just a little creativity while we are waiting out this virus shutdown. We found all the right elements to have a little Airsoft war scene while maintaining social distancing. We hope you enjoy these as much as we enjoyed creating them.