Stefano and Chiara: Love Shoot in Amsterdam

If every couple that I get to photograph for the rest of this year is as sweet, loving, friendly and downright photogenic as these two, 2014 will be an excellent year indeed. Stefano hired me to do a photo shoot for him and his fiancee, Chiara, during a trip to Amsterdam for her birthday in the first week of the new year, and we got so lucky - there was light! January in the Netherlands is usually very much the opposite of well lit, but this Saturday morning shoot was just perfect. We started and ended the shoot with coffee, and in between found some beautiful bridges, matching bikes and houses, the Rijksmuseum and the Vondelpark. I had a great time hanging out with these two!

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Amy and Barend at De Keukenhof tulip gardens

Amy and Barend are awesome. Amy contacted me recently about doing an engagement photo shoot of her and her Dutch fiancee at the world famous tulip garden, de Keukenhof, and I could barely contain my excitement. Really, it was a little embarrassing. De Keukenhof is quite likely the most beautiful place in the entire country, and this week was the peak of the short tulip season. We were also incredibly lucky with the weather - not a cloud in the sky! We arrived at the gardens as they were opening on Wednesday morning, the day after the coronation of the new king, so we managed to have the garden virtually to ourselves as the Dutch were nursing their hangovers and tourist buses hadn't flooded the gardens yet. Amy, Barend and I had a great time, making bad puns about wells, Game of Thrones, and dogs providing natural fertilizer to the flowers, and even though we had to negotiate our way over some barbed wire to get to the gorgeous flower fields outside the gardens, no one was injured in the making of this epic photo shoot. Thank you, Amy and Barend, for making my dreams come true.

:)

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Bounds-Picou Engagement

Nate and Alicia are a lot of fun. I actually knew Nate's sister better than I knew him, since she and I were in the same grade in high school, but last Christmas I met these two at an ugly Christmas sweater party - I really brought my A game, with snowflake-covered stirrup pants - and then six months later I had the good fortune to be their engagement photographer. They chose Old Salem for their shoot, a colonial-era Moravian area in Winston-Salem, which was a lovely location to explore.

Wolf-Sacks Engagement

Jason and Amber are two of my favorite people from Pennsylvania on the planet. Well, even among people not from Pennsylvania, they're pretty great. They met in college at Penn State and wound up in Danville, Virginia, where Jason worked as a sports reporter at the Danville Register & Bee, which is how I met him when I was working there as a staff photographer. We did their engagement photos at the Danville-Pittsylvania County Fair, which was just ridiculously fun - tons of color and lights, and a hilarious pair of friends.