I’m always a fan when we can travel to destinations and find areas that may not be quite as common or ones that you may expect to see. For example, Jackie and Brandon’s engagement session took place in Chicago, well technically a subdivision north of Chicago, but it was still a 4 hour drive for me and within 15 miles of downtown Chicago, so it’s all Chicago to me. 🙂 We started the session in a little park with a beach next to it. This allowed for quite a variety of pictures form wooded to wide open beach shots. I pushed myself to try some new angles and lighting methods, because as I’ve mentioned before, if you aren’t evolving, you’re dying, and I never want to get in a rut of doing the same thing over and over with photography. After some beach pictures, we drove around to the other side of the park which had more beach areas, but open grass areas as well as these cool areas between the park and the beach where it was full of tall grass surrounded by trees. It make for some pretty cool pictures.
Near the end of our session, we were walking by a location full of stone, looked like a little amphitheater out in the middle of this park. I sat Jackie and Brandon down in a spot, set up the flashes and had a lot of fun with this location. I told them that this is one of those locations that you don’t come across to often and I did not want to end our session until I got “the one.” Every picture I took, I really liked, but I just didn’t feel like it was the one yet. I didn’t want to go home, look through my pictures and think to myself, “Aw man, if I would have just done ____, this would be better.” So we spent quite a bit of time here so I could collect my thoughts, because let’s be real, this spot was absolutely amazing and I was pretty excited. After collecting my thoughts, we were able to create some pretty cool pictures and this first image I have posted was “the one” for me. I loved the way the colors turned out and the way the sun was peaking in on the side. Jackie and Brandon were a lot of fun to work with. It was definitely worth the 4 hour drive up and I’m glad we had such a great day for pictures too.
