I love post-wedding portraits, the session that comes after the stress, the partying, the noise and the traveling.

I’ve always loved the look of the Arlington Bridge, so we scheduled our shoot right behind the Lincoln Memorial, in the early morning at the beginning of October, a little colder than we would have liked but our couple looked amazing for this shoot. We needed some help with the lights and the dress, so we had four people in total helping us to get these results.

We will be posting the BTS video for this session pretty soon.

Every season will offer a different mood and light to your images, but I find the colors in the fall to be specially suited for family pictures. The orange and yellow tones help create a special kind of magic. This shot was taken at Rock Creek Park, Washington DC. Any place in the park looks like an amazing spot to photograph, so a 15 minute walk gave us plenty of opportunities to capture the mood of the day and the colors of this time of the year.

And so the phone rang on a morning in early October:

-Hi, so… do you take engagement photos?… 

Me: I do. When are you planning to propose?

-Today.  Is it too short notice?

Fortunately everything seemed to fall into place with this couple. My afternoon was open, the weather for that afternoon was great, and I live five minutes away from the National Harbor, where he was planning to propose. We’ve never met before the shoot, so the strategy was to exchange live locations over our cell phones. His fiancee had no clue about anything, and I was just going to play along and take a picture with their personal cell phone. I was the amateur photographer just casually shooting the sunset that theywould just happen to find as they take a stroll at the harbor.

The photos that we took that afternoon will forever be remembered, maybe printed and saved in a cardboard box, or hung on the walls of a house. Maybe forty years from now they will go back to these images and remember the crisp air of that evening, the cold sweat before the proposal, the orange color of the sun painting the sky.  They will remember that night’s dinner and the well wishes from their friends days after. Pictures matter, photography matters, but over all; memories matter, we take them with us forever.

Make your memories count.