Fantastic Seattle Engagement Photo Session at the Arboretum

Way back in May I was contacted by Aimee.  She and her fiance Jordan were going to be driving up from Utah to visit relatives in Seattle in mid-July, and they were hoping to get some engagement photos taken while they were here.  Apparently taking photos in Utah in the middle of the summer can be a very sweaty operation!

We emailed numerous times about possible locations and dates, and finally decided to do the engagement photo session on July 17 at the Washington Arboretum, a beautiful area located near the U of Washington.  Since it would be mid-summer I recommended that we take the photos in the morning before the sun got too high in the sky, both for better lighting and to keep from getting too hot if we had a warm day.

But Seattle weather being what it is, the morning of July 17 turned out to be cloudy and cool.  This was just fine with Aimee and Jordan, who had been getting cooked recently back in Utah as well as on their drive to Seattle.  While I love having a sunny day with blue skies for photos, it is actually much easier and in many ways better to have an overcast day when taking portraits.  Without the “bright thing in the sky”, there are very few problems with shadows or over bright highlights, and I can face my subjects in any direction without having to worry about them getting a bad case of the Squints because they are facing into the sun.

We met at the Visitor Center and headed right out for our session.  Also because the weather was less than perfect, there were not too many other visitors at the Arboretum at this time.  So we had very few issues with unintentional photo-bombers screwing up our photos!

The Arboretum is huge and I knew that there was no way we’d be able to cover all of it in the time we had for our session, so I tried to move us along as quickly as possible from location to location.  Most of my favorite photo locations are fairly near the Visitor Center so I was pretty sure we’d be able to hit most of them if didn’t dawdle.  As we walked I had a chance to find out a little about them.  One thing I always like to ask couples is how they first met.  As you can imagine, this has changed a LOT over the 35+ years that I have been a professional photographer.  These days probably >70% of the couples I work with met online, so I was not at all surprised when they told that was how they had met.   But they are one of the few couples I have worked with who met on Tinder.

We spent a very pleasant hour exploring the Arboretum and taking photos whenever we found a likely spot.  Jordan and Aimee proved to be wonderful subjects; once they started laughing they behaved like pro models, posing with very little direction on my part.

It was a very enjoyable session and I’m looking forward to seeing them again if they decide to have their wedding in Seattle.