Most of our wedding commissions include a portrait session, to celebrate the couple and their personalities- who they are at this time in their lives. These sessions are at least four hours long and provide a wonderful opportunity to get to know the couple and their relationship style. We’ve been told by some photographers that we’re crazy to dedicate this much time to a portrait session, but we feel that the experience and the results we achieve require this level of dedication.

With Jacilyn and Ryan, as with many couples initially, their assumption was that we’d want to shoot their engagement session in the park, or at the beach. A beautiful location is generally a great place to start, but for us a meaningful location will always trump that! Once we had an opportunity to get to know them, about their passions and how they spend time as a couple, it became clear that infinitely more interesting opportunities lay before us (both for the relevance of their image collection to who they are today and the creative visual/photographic elements we could employ to tell this story).

Imagine looking at portraits of yourself and your partner, photographed at (one of) the prime times in your life. When your body is tired, you’ve likely had a family, and the memories of the defining moments of your life have become a little foggy, it would be comforting and exciting to hold an album in your hands that genuinely represents you at your best. We want to make that album for our clients.

Jacilyn and Ryan are best friends, with a lot of heat! They are sweet with each other, respectful, comfortable and motivating. J&R are really into fitness and sports, and they brought a lot of great energy to the shoot.

Ryan is an accomplished boxer, and the club he’s been to since he was 11 years old is so perfectly authentic — down to the bloody carpets. Jacilyn competed in track and field and re-visited her high school days as a hurdler — took care of business like it was yesterday! Here is a sampling of their final image collection.