Austin & Katie | A Halloween Wedding - 10.31.15

I've never had to photograph a wedding on Halloween, but when Austin & Katie asked me I was willing to take on as photographer for their special day, but I was secretly hoping it would be themed around the holiday... this wasn't the case though, they wanted to keep it traditional. Honestly I would've done the same most likely.

It was a beautiful fall day, trees were colorful, we were in the mountains at a camp location, it was partly cloudy midday and overcast by sunset, even a light rain a few times. But for lighting, this was great for me, I always enjoy shooting under clouds when it's midday, and clear skies when the sun gets lower for that beautiful lighting.

When it was time to take some photos of the bride & groom, and with the party, we walked over to (what I was told) an abandoned chicken coop, and with it looking so eerie I thought we need to take some "spooky" looking shots with the couple, in lieu of this particular day they chose to tie the knot.

The couple was a lot of fun, lots of great ideas around the location; fishing, canoeing, standing on a bridge, etc. All-in-all they had a great connection with each other, which I tried to capture some of this connection, the simple moments they had between each other. One particular shot that comes to mind was when they were playing cornhole out on the patio deck when everyone else was inside mingling and dancing. They just snuck away with only each other, and enjoyed the simple pleasures of only each other's presence.

I wish these two many blessings on their wonderful marriage! I'll post some of the photos in a small gallery here, and also on my 500px account, so be sure to check it out!

Happy Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day! Love is in the air and I was inspired by a blog to do a themed shoot for this day of love. This was the first shoot of the day with Ed & Ashley (you can view the second one in my previous post). As always, things were getting close to the wire to when we wanted to start shooting, I had purchased some props the day before at Michaels, and done some crafting the morning of.

I had this idea to shoot at the Goat Farm but was too short notice to reserve it, so thought Old Fourth Ward Park or Piedmont may be an option until Ashley suggested Mason Mill Park. It was about half a mile from my apartment so I knew that park well, and would ride through it but never actually stopped to solo off the paved 1 mile path that connects the two parks.

It's amazing, there's an old mill in ruins (there are a lot of them are around Atlanta) and it was covered in beautiful graffiti. It was surrounded by trees and nature, but had this urban touch to it. It was mid afternoon, so the sun was getting to a perfect angle and we first setup against a wall with stairs that just went to the top of it. We started grabbing different poses, angles and emotions between them as a couple, and moved to another wall that had some windows and doors, what looked as if someone had knocked a sledgehammer to create it, but maybe just had fallen apart over the years of abandonment.

It was a fun shoot, I've done weddings before and was trying to steer away from the standard "engagement" look to these photos, but it still came out that way, and I don't think I could've gotten around it as this style of shooting is trying to capture the love between each other. These two were once again awesome to work with, and really worked well together and we all came up with ideas throughout the shoot as well as they easily took direction to some ideas I had.