I was going to photograph Sharmeen and Jules’ wedding on May 10th, but they had to postpone their big day for a future date when the Army decided to relocate them to Fairbanks, Alaska. So, we made do with a great engagement portrait session at Point Defiance Park just a few days before their moving van hit the road.

I shoot more engagement portrait sessions at Point Defiance Park than all other places put together for a good reason — it’s amazing! Here, we start at the Japanese Garden.

Then we drove down to Owen Beach, which is a picture-perfect representation of the rocky, driftwood-strewn beaches of Washington State. Even its weathered concrete seawall makes for a great backdrop!

Our last stop was my favorite little section of the native rain forest that makes up the heart of Point Defiance Park. Because this section is particularly shady, the moss grows thicker and greener on the forest floor, and the whole area practically glows green.

All the best to you in Alaska, Sharmeen and Jules!

For the site of their engagement portraits, Carolyn and Erik picked one of Seattle’s coolest places: Gas Works Park. What a great place this is for photographers, with its collection of beautiful and bizarre features!

Gas Works Park is the site of the former Seattle Gas Light Company gasification plant, which turned coal into gas. The plant closed in 1956, but parts of it were left intact, even as the City of Seattle converted the prime piece on land on which it sat into a public park that opened in 1975. As a result, it’s a park that redefines the idea of beauty. It cleverly blends natural, urban and industrial beauty in a single location.

We started our session at the row of orphaned concrete train trestles near one entrance to the park, where we got a variety of great shots of Carolyn and Erik posing, laughing and walking together.

These next two photos are an interesting pair — as different as they are, they were shot with Carolyn and Erik standing in the same place! The primary difference is due to the lens I used.

In the first photo, I backed up and used a telephoto lens to make the skyscrapers of downtown Seattle seem larger and more impressive. In the second photo, I stood much closer to Carolyn and Erik and used an extreme wide-angle fisheye lens, which put more emphasis on the waters of Lake Union, in the process shrinking the city on the far shore.

This is the largest of the six synthetic natural gas generator towers at Gas Works Park, photographed from an angle that effectively hides the chain-link fence surrounding it behind the grassy hill.

Here we’re up on the park’s large man-made hill, molded out of thousands of cubic yards of rubble from building foundations covered with fresh topsoil.

And here we found a shady spot by some cedar trees for a simpler backdrop.

At another park of Gas Works Park is the former pump house, now called the play barn. Most of the original pumps, compressors, and piping are still in place and painted in bright colors. In this first photo, Carolyn and Erik are framed by a nine-ton flywheel that continuously generated 3,000 horsepower of compression to keep the plant running 24 hours a day.

The pump house and adjacent boiler house/picnic shelter have great architecture — though in the last photo, I was standing uncomfortably close to a man sleeping in a corner!

I shot these portraits back in February, and enjoyed going through them again because I’ll be photographing Carolyn and Erik’s wedding in just two days!

Dawn and Jeremy got engaged at the beautiful Bloedel Reserve public garden on Bainbridge Island, and their original plan was for us to shoot their engagement portraits there — until discovering professional portrait photography isn’t allowed at Bloedel. So we turned to Lakewold Gardens, which didn’t disappoint on this warm Cinco de Mayo day!

Before we continue, a quick note about portrait sessions at Lakewold Gardens. There’s a $25 advance fee that Lakewold charges per session, plus $27 to cover three entrance fees into the gardens. I’m sure part of their reason for the fee is the same reason that Bloedel doesn’t allow any portrait sessions — to keep the place from being overrun with photographers! At least the money is going toward a good cause.

Lakewold Gardens has over 900 Rhododendron bushes, and I think most of them were flowering during our visit. We shot this first batch of photos in a shady little corner near Lakewold’s super-cool swimming pool.

Then we headed into the Woodland Garden, which is a portion of the gardens that I seldom get to take brides. (Most brides aren’t too crazy about dirt paths.) We ended up on the shore of Gravelly Lake before heading back up the hill.

We were fortunate that Wagner House was open, and took the opportunity to create a few portraits in front of the historic, hand-painted Japanese mural on the foyer walls.

One final stop at a weathered brick wall with this gun-toting statue and we were done!

I’ll be seeing Dawn and Jeremy again soon — we’re looking forward to photographing their wedding at Thornewood Castle next weekend!

We met Corina at the 2013 Seattle Wedding Show, and when we learned her and Ian’s wedding was taking place under the Space Needle at the new Chihuly Garden and Glass, they became our #1 target. I’m totally excited to photograph their wedding this September!

On the first day of February, we met at Golden Gardens Park, one of Seattle’s most photogenic locations that happens to be close to their home. I shot the first photo below with a fisheye lens from inside a grove of tall, skinny, leafless trees. Then we headed closer to the water, where we found both rocky and sandy beaches to work with.

A spontaneous twirl on the beach:

I loved this hot-pink park bench the instant I spotted it.

There’s this damp pedestrian tunnel under the railroad tracks that cut through Golden Gardens. It’s pretty grungy, and apparently the paint on its walls is permanently wet. (Fortunately, this discovery was made by my fingers, not Corina and Ian’s clothing.) The tunnel makes for some cool photo opportunities, though, including this silhouette. The mossy concrete on the far side works well in photos, too.

Ian proposed to Corina at nearby Shilshole Bay Marina, so we walked over toward the end of our shoot to get some nice photos on the docks, including these two. Then we called it a wrap until the big day in September!

Fitness guru Nicole is a recent transplant from New York City now living in Olympia to be with fiance Adam. They’ll be getting married this September in Vegas. We aren’t able to photograph it, so this was my one chance to photograph these two.

Being a city girl, Nicole wanted an urban look to her engagement portraits, and as it happens, downtown Tacoma is very photogenic! We met at the Washington State History Museum, then headed over to the Museum of Glass. Both buildings have some really cool, uniquely Tacoma features that I enjoy incorporating into my photos. A photo at WSHM is above, and three at MOG below.

This next photo is an extreme wide-angle shot of Nicole and Adam in front of the Museum of Glass Hot Shop Cone, under some dramatic skies at the far end of a long reflecting pool. Their faces are tiny at this size, but think how awesome this image would look on the wall as a big, glossy aluminum print! In a 24×30 inch print, the couple would be 2 inches tall, large enough to see their faces from a close distance, while being a stunning piece of urban landscape art from further away.

We detoured to a nearby building to make use of a couple photogenic walls …

… then headed onto the Tacoma campus of the University of Washington. Though the campus is relatively new, most of the buildings are restored historic warehouses, including this one with tall, arched windows.

For the last leg of our shoot, we drove to the north end of downtown, where I photographed Nicole and Adam in front of the colorful walls of a historic building on Antique Row, on the recently restored Spanish Steps, and inside a parking garage with graffiti — the artistic kind — painted on every available inch of wall.

Congrats Nicole and Adam on your wedding to come!