Posts Tagged: outdoors

Jordan & Sarah | Central Illinois Engagement Session

This was my first outdoor winter photo session, and it was as cold as it looks – central Illinois isn’t very “pleasant” around the New Year. But don’t worry, I was all bundled up (see the last picture) and Sarah & Jordan were troopers! Sarah is Katie’s cousin, and we’ve gotten to know Jordan & Sarah as a couple over the last few years during holidays and other trips home. Right before we went back to Illinois for Christmas this year, we found out they got engaged! As usually happens when you’re a photographer, the discussion soon turned to photo sessions and the next thing we knew, we’d scheduled an engagement session and started talking wedding photography!

All the photos below were taken on Sarah’s parents’ property, which is a really beautiful section of wooded land, farmland, a river, and there’s even an abandoned bridge.  We couldn’t have asked for a better setting, and the pictures turned out beautifully.  We also got a chance to include Snickers, their goldendoodle, in the photo shoot as well!  Our time with Jordan and Sarah (and Snickers) was a lot of fun, and we can’t wait to photograph their wedding in July!

 

 

 

 

 

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Mike & Brittany | Chicago Engagement Photography

While visiting my family & Katie’s family in Illinois this holiday week, we were able to carve out some time to spend with friends.  My best friend, Mike, and his fiancee, Brittany, already had tickets to the Friday afternoon Cubs game, so we decided to join them, but not before a detour through the South Pond area of Lincoln Park Zoo to take some engagement pictures!  I have always wanted to take engagement or wedding pictures at this location because of the really cool architecture and the combination of the outdoor/natural feel with the awesome views of the Chicago skyline.  (The Hancock Building, left, and the Sears Tower, faint right, are both shown in second picture below, which I love.)  And it works out perfect when you also get to hang out with really good friends who recently got engaged!  Anyway, we spent about an hour and half taking pictures before finally catching a cab up to Wrigley Field, buying some pizza, scalping two tickets for me and Katie, and then watching the Cubs lose to the Pirates (sigh).  It was a lot of fun, and nothing beats Chicago in the summer (Chicago in the fall is pretty close, though).  These few images below were just the first few to catch my eye as I was reviewing them in Lightroom – expect more to come in the near future!  Congrats to Mike & Brittany!  Can’t wait for the wedding in September!

 

 

 

 

 

Pennybacker Bridge | Austin, Texas

It’s been a while since I’ve done any HDR photography (which is simply a method of combining multiple bracketed images to create one image with a larger dynamic range than a normal photograph), but I just couldn’t help myself a few nights ago. As I’ve mentioned previously, I can’t stand when people use HDR to create some ridiculously phony looking picture (Google it), but that’s just personal preference. I like to utilize it in a minimal way to effectively re-create the image as I remember my eyes seeing it, since our eyes have significantly higher dynamic range than our cameras. Hopefully I was able to do that here. This is the Pennybacker Bridge – the portion of Capital of Texas Highway 360 that spans Lake Austin. You can see the skyscrapers of the Austin skyline peeking out over the horizon just to the left of the bridge in each photo.  Enjoy!