Caesar's Head and YMCA Pretty Place Engagement photos

Caesar’s Head State Park | Camp YMCA Pretty Place Engagement Photos

Sara and David

Mountain engagement photos are my favorite thing to do as a Wedding Photographer….but they are definitely not for everyone. Mountain engagements require so much planning, and are so dependent on current weather conditions that I sometimes have to re-schedule them multiple times before being able to stick a time. They also require traveling very far away, sometimes as much as 2-2.5 hours away from Greenville SC to get the look and feel that we need. But sometimes I will get an adventurous couple who doesn’t mind these things, and despite having a very busy schedule, is still willing to go through all this to get unique and memorable engagement photos. Enter Sara and David – they are all this and so much more.

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Sara and David met while living in Tokyo Japan way back in 7th grade, getting closer in high school and eventually attending senior prom together. But as life sometimes requires, they were forced to go their separate ways after high school when David attended Cornell University and Sara attended Clemson right here in SC. As luck would have it, they met each other again in Detroit, and later Charlotte – and since those chance encounters, they have been inseparable since! Now living in Greenville, they have a bright future to look to together. But with this bright future comes a busy schedule – and a need for adventure and something more unique than standard engagement photos. So from the beginning, we planned and planned to get the perfect session to announce their engagement.

Our original time and location plans were going great…until the blizzard happened the night before we were scheduled to shoot. Mountain engagement photos are a tough enough challenge in January with the bitter cold in some of these areas, but add in up to a foot of snow from winter storm Jonas, and you get an impossible situation. While I would love having snow on the ground to work with, Jonas resulted in the closure of the entire 469 mile length of the Blue Ridge Parkway, where many of my photo locations are. Even our backup locations were too dangerous to even try. But with Sara and David’s deadline to get save-the-dates out approaching quickly, we had to make something work. It took about a week for everything to melt enough to travel again, but we decided to try again – and the second time was definitely the charm.

Our reward for our patience and obsessive planning during this session was a perfect sunset, clear skies, and two perfect locations: Camp YMCA Pretty Place Chapel and Caesar’s Head State Park in SC. Please check out the resulting images from their amazing session below. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed working with this great couple!