I will follow adventurous couples anywhere!! Sara and Paul are getting married this June at Lingrow Farm and while they are from the Pittsburgh area, they live out of state now. For their spring engagement photos, they wanted to travel back to where it all began and visit all of the locations in Pittsburgh that were special to them and showcase the city they fell in love with. From their first date in Lawrenceville, to the bridge they walked across to work every day, to the Children’s Museum and the Point State Park, we had a great time playing tourists around town. Our original plan had been to do their photo session in pittsburgh in the winter with all of the holiday lights, but mother nature decided it should be zero degrees that weekend! So we waited. Then we rescheduled for Easter and it looked like we might have snow instead of flowers for their spring engagement, but we got lucky and had one of the rare warm days in March and even found a few cherry blossoms under the yellow bridges!
Some of the best advice I can give to couples planning their engagement session is to choose locations that are meaningful to them.
Good photos make you look great. Great photos make you remember feeling great. Choosing the right locations is so important to making your photos meaningful so that when you look back at them down the road you’ll link them to your memories. It’s like having the opportunity to illustrate the story book that is your life. The first question I ask couples when we start to talk about their engagement photos is what do you guys like to do for fun? Tell me your proposal story. Do you have a favorite place that you visit or made great memories? Those are the kinds of locations that we look for when it’s time to shoot your session. Places change a lot over time. Communities grow, trees get taller and then smaller. Landmarks that you walked by every day might one day look completely different. That’s why it’s special to give your photos a sense of place. I was fortunate enough to meet Sam Abell once and hear him speak about his decades of work with National Geographic. Something he said stood out to me and I keep it mind every time I go out to shoot. He described his formula for a great photo as “a still life linked to a landscape, you build the background layer first”.
I love the feeling of this shot – laughing in the sun on the bridge with bikers and pedestrians flying past. Life moving all around them, but for the two of them they are just enjoying being together.
Other great advice for your photo session – don’t take yourself so seriously!!! Chill! Have fun. Stop worrying about what things might look like, just concentrate on what being together feels like and let your photographer do the rest. These two decided to act out super hero poses. To that I say, paint on, brother.
Be auspicious. Be adventurous. Be yourself.
