Erin and Jake’s West Chester Engagement Photography session at the park

About two minutes before we left our house in West Chester to meet Erin and Jake for their engagement session, it started raining.  Genava and I were pretty bummed, but after checking our iphones and the Doppler radar app, we were optimistic that it might just miss the park, which is only five minutes out of town.

We drove over to meet with Erin and Jake, and proceeded cautiously at first, keeping an eye on a massive thunderstorm about a mile away. Luckily, despite the several angry looking clouds looming overhead, it never materialized into any rain, so we were able to venture pretty far into the park. The clouds also lent a very interesting moody backdrop to some of the photographs.

Erin and Jake were awesome and perfectly natural in front of the camera, even though Erin admitted that she was really nervous about getting engagement photos taken of them.  I was more nervous that we were going to get caught in a downpour, but that’s the risk you take doing engagement photography in July!

Erin and I had actually communicated a lot about the style of engagement photos she was looking for, and we were really trying for a very natural looking engagement session.  We found a great location with a field of flowers, and the light was perfect for about 9 minutes. Coincidentally Erin told us that it was in this very same field about a month after they had started dating that Erin’s brother had snapped a photo of them!

We got lucky, and we were in the exact right place at the exact right time for the light to line up for some amazingly beautiful natural light photographs of the happy couple.

Towards the end of their engagement session, we ran out of  light so it was time to break out our new 600Ex-Rt flashes.   These new flashes are great to use when you want to get creative with off-camera lighting, and it’s so awesome to reliably control a remote flash from wherever I’m standing instead of  having to walk over and change it by hand.