This engagement shoot gave me all the feels. It was special for so many reasons, in part because I’ve actually known these two since we were all kids! Through the craziness of life, our lives have reconnected us is wonderful ways…Anna attending SCAD while I was still there (and in fact helping me with some photography projects), Anna and Devin reconnecting in Gainesville after years, and Anna and I reconnecting again once I moved back down to Florida and was looking to make my business carbon neutral.
More importantly, Anna is an incredibly talented and creative person herself. She’s got an impeccable eye for design, style, and art, so when she approached me about her vision for this shoot – all black and white images in beautiful landscapes – I was honored, thrilled, inspired, but also nervous. It’s not the typical type of engagement photography that I shoot, but my personal photography work has always been rooted in black and white landscape work, so thinking about combining the two was really exciting for me.
For the first part of the shoot, we wanted to get some images with their old Camaro before it completely stopped working. We should have known once we had trouble getting it started in the driveway that it might have already been too late to take it out because we totally ended up stranded for a bit on the side of the road with a dead battery…oops! (No worries, your photographer also knows how to jump cars.)
From there we made a quick stop at San Felasco and then off to Swallowtail Farm, a super special place for Anna and Devin, and now a super special place for me too. If you haven’t been to one of Swallowtail’s Farm to Table Dinners, check out their upcoming schedule, they are definitely worth attending. Also, side note for anyone planning a wedding, Swallowtail Farm now offers beautiful, fresh wildflower arrangements as well.
There’s definitely something about black and white landscapes that makes you have to pause for a moment and take the scene in. What I love about this series of engagement photos is there’s a fun duality between images where the emotion and personality of Anna and Devin really stand out and others where the landscape almost swallows them up so that they become a beautifully intimate and quiet element in the scenery.
I can definitely envision these images as huge, like even 30×40″ prints on fine art paper pinned to a wall or even giant framed prints with a very thin frame. Anna and Devin plan to have these in some type of large format hanging at the their wedding, which I just can’t wait to see! In the meantime I started mocking up ideas like the one below of how I could see them hanging…
