Since the beginning, Carolyn struck me as a fun, upbeat kind of girl with a lot of personality, but it wasn’t until I finally met her for the first time during our engagement session on Sunday that I realized just how right I was! Her and Mike make a great couple; they are silly, laid back and lucky-for-me, very photogenic! Being naturals in front of the camera, I hardly had to give them any direction at all, and I especially enjoyed incorporating some of their unique ideas toward the end of the shoot.

We started off in Doylestown, PA, which is a cute town driving through, but often times when you get down on the ground level of something like that, the “cuteness” is difficult to translate into photos. I knew right away when we got there we were going to have to get creative with this location, and when Carolyn mentioned there was a train station nearby I was pretty excited. We headed directly for the station, and did come across at least one cute photo opportunity along with the way.

We arrived at the station and it was the first one I had actually ever seen that was at the end of the tracks. There was one active track, but the best part about it was that there were parked trains at the end of the other tracks. I knew that a lot of what we did for these photos was illegal (oops!) and even dangerous when we used the active track, but both me and the couple decided we were O.K. with risking our lives for photos. DEFINITELY my kind of couple!

I could have easily gotten caught up at the tracks all day, but luckily I had my husband there with me assisting with the reflector and other equipment and he kindly reminded me we had a second and THIRD location on the agenda. We headed over to Font Hill, an awesome location that the couple had picked out all on their own.

One of the things I was able to do especially well with Sean’s assistance was to create some dramatic off-camera lighting to give one area of the location a castle-passageway type feel.

I had been hoping with our timing, that there’d be a view of the sunset from somewhere in the park. Trees unfortunately were blocking all views of the horizon… and THEN we saw THIS shot. I told the couple, “Well, we can’t get the sun, but we can get THE MOON!”

So our last location for the session was something extra special… Carolyn and Mike’s house, haha. They actually contacted me about a week before the session saying they’d like it if we could try to get in some old-fashioned photobooth shots for their save-the-dates, and wanted to know if I’d be able to recreate something like that. I said I’d need a white sheet and a place to plug in my studio light and we made it happen. To make the shots truly authentic, I even gave them only three seconds between each pose to come up with a new pose before I clicked, just like the old arcade machines did. Obviously they knew they’d get a lot more tries than four, but it was still HILARIOUS to watch them panicking to come up with new poses after each shot like just like they would in the booth!

Overall, this was an EXTREMELY fun e-session, which yielded a lot of variety. Thanks SO MUCH to the couple for contributing your ideas and just being all-around super-enjoyable to work with! September 2011 can’t come soon enough!