Seattle Engagement Photography Session at Discovery Park

If you’re planning a wedding, it’s a ton of work and sometimes can be stressful. One thing that feels like a highlight during all of this is enjoying your engagement session. It’s something that you can pretty easily check off your list, it gives you a great experience and memory, and it helps move you forward with other elements of wedding plans, like save-the-dates and a wedding website. I love getting to enjoy this stage with my couples because it feels truly celebratory.

Even though you might not think it at first, your photo session is actually a great chance to spend some quality time together and just focus on one another. Obviously, getting beautiful and candid photos of your relationship is a huge plus, too! For 99.9% of my couples, their engagement session is the first time ever being photographed professionally. So amidst all the excitement you might feel slightly nervous about a camera being around your personal space and story. As a photographer who shoots a lot of weddings, elopements and engagement sessions, I feel like my secret weapon is to help put you at ease and create a space where you can really just be yourself and trust that I’ll find the beauty in that and turn it into great photos. It doesn’t hurt that living in Seattle gives us so many beautiful PNW locations to get the setting just right, too.

Enjoy this sunny session at Discovery Park!

Seattle Mountain Engagements | Payton + Brian

In Seattle there are endless opportunities for beautiful engagement session locations. We have beautiful urban views, water for years, and greenery like nowhere else. Just a little further out of the city, the mountains call with their grand views. It’s hard to narrow it down! And you’re only engaged once, right? That can feel like a lot of pressure. I like to start the conversation by asking if there’s anywhere special to you as a couple in Seattle. Maybe there’s a park you had your first date in, or a place where you first started talking about what forever might feel like together as a couple. That stuff matters! When you close your eyes and think about spending time just focused on each other and celebrating your own unique love story, what comes to mind? What does the air smell like? What’s beneath your feet? Are you in grand open space or tucked in somewhere cozy? The best thing is there are no wrong answers, when you get the photos back you’ll just see the love between you, and years down the line, when you look at them again, you’ll see a version of yourself that has grown and evolved so much, and created a life all of your own with your love.

If you need a Seattle or PNW wedding photographer, contact me here!

Discovery Park Engagement Session | Seattle Wedding Photographer

Sammy & Alejandro are planning a destination wedding and asked me to capture their engagement session. Sammy had been following on Instagram, and I love the joy of meeting people in real life from that crazy little app!

Discovery Park is one of my favorite spots for engagement photos in Seattle because it’s so beautiful all year round, it’s one of the only spots I know if that has a vast grassy field overlooking water, and it’s a good walk from the parking lot to the area I like to shoot, which means we get plenty of time to get to know each other. I try to never start shooting until I feel like there’s a solid baseline of trust between me and my couple. I want to be able to pick up on their energy, read their cues and really tell their true story, never just run them through a bunch of poses I use with everyone.

After the park, we ran over to the downtown area of Magnolia to switch up the vibe. We grabbed a coffee and wandered. Without a specific plan, we just followed the light and looked for spots that felt right. To me, it’s so much better than pre-scouting a spot and then having the light change, and nothing is the way I thought it would be. This way, it’s a bit of a hunt we go on together, and feels like an adventure. There’s always good light to be found in Seattle.

Updated to include film scans from this day! Shooting film is becoming a passion of mine quickly. It’s a way to offer a totally fresh and different perspective to a digital set of images. I love the texture and the of-the-moment sense.

Seattle In-Home and City Engagement Session

In-home sessions are some of my absolute favorites. Especially when it’s for your engagement photos — you’ll move on and live in different places as you share your lives together, so it’s really special to honor the place where you began your story together. As time goes by they become even more of a treasure. I loved meeting up with Cari & Matt, hanging out in their place and then going for a neighborhood walk. It was a perfect way to spend a Saturday.

This session includes a few film scans taken on a variety of film cameras. One of which I had just purchased from Goodwill for $7 and found that it was mostly broken but made some cool photos!