Spring Engagement Photo Session with Courtney and Ian

Several weeks ago I spent a very enjoyable afternoon taking engagement photos with Courtney and Ian.  I need to start with a little background.  I’ve known Courtney since she was born; her father Conrad has been one of my best friends for years, and her mother Sue Anne lived in the same coed house that my future wife and I lived in our senior year at Stanford.  The story of how we introduced Sue Anne and Conrad will have to wait for another post!

Enough digressing, on to the session!  Courtney had some very definite opinions on what she wanted for her photos (which came as no surprise to me, she has always known what she wants!), but her request was one that is tougher than you’d think.  She wanted to have mountains in some of the photos.  If you know Seattle, you’d say “No problem, we have mountains everywhere”, which is very true.  But taking photos while IN the mountains is very different than having mountains as a key feature in the photos.  And since this session took place while there was still a lot of snow on the “easy to access” mountain trails, our options were limited.

We finally decided that nearby North Bend should meet the requirements.  If you remember the TV series Twin Peaks, much of it was filmed in and around North Bend.  On the TV show there were two “twin peaks” while the reality is that Mt Si is the only real mountian there, and special effects were used to create a duplicate for the show.  Mt Si is a quite imposing backdrop in the North Bend area so we thought we’d be able to get some photos that would meet Courtney’s requirements.

We started at a park with a great backdrop of Mt Si and the valley, and then moved on to one of my favorite photo locations near North Bend, an abandoned railroad trestle that crosses the Snoqualmie River jusy outside of town.  We finished with a stop at a kids park off the old highway that was once the main route over the Cascades, passing through the middle of North Bend, until I90 was built and the freeway bypassed the town.

Here are some photos from the session.  Lots more on my blog at this link if you’d like to see more.