For Briana & Pat’s engagement session we wanted to use a couple of different locations around Philly, with the intention of creating a lot of variety and to tell their love story with their favorite views of the city as a backdrop.
The image above is one of my favorite photos from their session, which we made over at Elfreth’s Alley in Olde City Philadelphia, but let’s start from the beginning…
We started out over in Manayunk with their super-cute dog, Gemma, for just about 20 minutes of casual lifestyle pics, as well as a few portraits. Briana pointed out this cool mural that says ‘I love Manayunk’ that she had in mind to use for a couple photos…
OMG their dog = cute!
I did mention that their dog was cute right?! Gemma decided to steal their thunder for a couple of portraits with the Manayunk Bridge in the background.
Next, they returned their dog to their home, and switched outfits to a more formal look for the part of their engagement shoot that we would be doing over at the Museum of Art in Philadelphia. We really only wanted to go after one look while we were there, since they had envisioned a nice portrait with the Philadelphia skyline as a background for their ‘save the date’ cards.
I felt like we had made a nice set of portraits with the city in the background, viewed from the Art Museum steps looking towards City Hall, so we moved on to get a few more improvised looks around the Philadelphia Museum of Art area before heading to the next spot.
We all jumped into Briana & Pat’s car and drove over to Elfreth’s Alley in Olde City Philadelphia for a few more looks. Briana also made the most of her photo session by having another dress to put on for this next part.
At this time it was starting to get dark… a bit too dark to rely on the available light for taking photos there. After a couple of natural-light shots to warm up I decided to use my lighting gear to create a few more dramatic looks. I love using lighting around sunset, so I was really pleased with how this next set of images came out.
I would have loved to just continue snapping photos of Briana & Pat all night, but they had a fancy dinner reservation to get to, so it was time to start wrapping things up.
Luckily, we had just enough time to run over to this top-secret photo location where we could get a really good view of the city at night. I wanted one more opportunity to get that epic city skyline portrait… and I love to make night-time shots with my lighting stuff, so I was having a blast looking for different angles to try to get the city skyline in these last couple of portraits.
Overall, I was really happy with how their whole engagement session turned out, and they were also very stoked when I delivered the final images. Hopefully we got the perfect image for their save the date cards.
I am very much looking forward to photographing Briana & Pat on their wedding at The Lucy in Philadelphia next year, and I think it was really a valuable experience for us all to work together in this laid back way before their wedding.
