Top 50 engagement photos of 2008

We just sat down and went through all of our engagement shoots from 2008. It brought back some awesome memories and it get us really excited to shoot a bunch of weddings this year!

Over the next few days, as we catch up with our posts, we'll be mixing in some favorites from our weddings, too. With the nearly 50 completely amazing weddings we shot last year, that may take a little longer :).  We nearly strangled each other over which ones we'd inclue here...

After some serious thought, these were our favorite shots of '08, many of which we've never blogged before (from 50 to 1):

Thank you for letting us share these photos with you, and another huge THANK YOU to all of our couples who made these great shots with us. 

Kaitlin and Mark

Alyssa and I met up with Mark and Kaitlin down at the Arena yesterday afternoon for a cold, cold, cold engagement shoot. Luckily, we had a really cool couple ( hey, a horrible pun, my bad!) to work with and as soon as the shutters started flying we were good to go :).

The only request they had for their shoot was that we somehow incorporate the love of their sports lives, the Buffalo Sabres. Not a problem - the little area right next to the HSBC Arena is suprisingly rad for photography. 

Besides - it is ALWAYS easy to take awesome photos of couples in love with smiles like Mark and Kaitlin's.

This is definitely one of my favorite shots we took when we headed out front for a few minutes. We were bummed we couldn't get inside, but the Arena is locked down tight on non-game Sundays.

Since we were so close, we decided to explore the Naval Park and some of the surrounding urban stuff. We're always looking for rock, brick or anykind of cool wall texture to use in our photos...

Alyssa and I sometimes just drive around looking for cool places we'd like to shoot - and we saw this random little place a while back...so we filed it away in our "visual notebook". I still have NO idea what this structure is for, but a cool, round opening in a brick wall is just about right for some fun pics.

Aaahh - and Alyssa apparently caught me wearing my ridiculous neon-green biking gloves. Thankfully you can't see them all that well here, but they're the only thing I have that's thin enough to use on my camera's controls AND keep my hands functioning. You see, one night in Afghanistan we got stuck in this village during a snowstorm and a bunch of us got minor cases of frostbite (we had a thermometer that stopped working at -20, so it was frickin cold). Ever since my hands stop working in the cold....hence my ridiculous gloves. Maybe I could play receiver for the Seahawks...

I think Kaitlin is a straight up classic beauty with an easy smile - you're a lucky dude, Mark!

Really cute couple - they held hands the entire shoot whenever they could.

So - to wrap up our frigid shoot, we were so close to the light rail that we had to go shoot a little at the station...I'm a sucker for a good piggy-back ride shot.

And then we wanted to do the "blur the train car in the background" shot, which we've never done with a couple here in Buffalo...so we waited, and waited, and waited...and we thought the stupid thing was NEVER going to come...and then it came out of nowhere! Apparently the gap between trains is a little long on Sundays...

Great couple, fun shoot! Thanks Mark and Kaitlin. Alyssa and I hope everybody has a great week if you're heading back to work after the holiday. If anybody is going to be at the Sabres game tomorrow night (Tuesday), stop down and see me - I'll be crouching down by the ice somewhere with a lens stuck through the glass for at least some of the action :). 

Tori and Brian's Engagement shoot

Alyssa and I had no intention of the doing the Black Friday two-step yesterday. As much as I would love to help our floundering economy out by buying a sale-priced kitchenaid stand mixer (Alyssa and I have an unnatural love for kitchen appliances, and were close to pulling the trigger...I mean, who doesn't want a mixer that has a pasta-making attachment?!?), there is just no way we're trying to pull off early morning shopping with the boy. A few years ago I went to Best Buy and bought this MP3 player at, like, 4 in the morning. After standing in line for about two hours to get this crappy little gizmo, I promptly lost the receipt that would have let me fulfill the mail in rebate offer that would have made the thing an actual good deal in the first place. I gave up early-morning shopping after that.

Besides, Alyssa and I (and Murphy at 5 - thanks, pal) woke up from our tryptophan-fueled comas to stare out at the bleary landscape of Buffalo in late November...and wait a damn minute. There's no snow on the ground...the sun is shining like crazy...and we have a great-looking couple to shoot in the morning!?!? This, of course, brings us to Brian and Tori.

We started at this random, funky bridge on the UB North campus and kicked it from there. Alyssa spotted the bridge earlier this summer, so I knew we'd be back to it. Frankly, though, we could have shot Brian and Tori in a closet and been fine - they were like old pros posing for us...

Right off the footprint of the bridge, well - I don't know what kid of plant this is - but it looks awesome when the sunlight is just right and everybody's smiling :). I think it was the last engagement photo shoot we posted that Alyssa talked about how a lot of times we'll pull similar stuff for the blog because our thought process is so similar...the same thing totally happened here. The next four are me, Alyssa, Alyssa then me again...

Photography is pretty simple stuff at its core - light, compostion and an interesting subject. When you have a couple like Tori and Brian, I have a hard time considering what we do a job. These guys were awesome to shoot, just awesome.

We wrapped things up at UB and decided we'd celebrate the city-loving part of Tori and Brian's relationship by shooting for a while in Allentown. 

Thanks for the "what in the hell is the photographer doing down there?" look, Brian...I have been known to lay down on the job.

This photo is easily my favorite of the day. I had exactly one frame left on the card I was using and Alyssa was working on the set-up...so I popped in, shot this and immediately knew I had the exact feeling we'd been working to capture. 

Thank you, so much Tori and Brian! 

Christine and Mike

Christine wasn't a dog person -- for years Mike wanted to get a dog, and she told him absolutely not. Apparently she softened up, because not only is she the proud mama of the cutest cockapoo, Rushford, she loves him so much she wanted him to be a part of her engagement photos! So, Rushford hung out with us over at Bird Island Pier to start the engagement shoot...

We call this one "The Family Portrait."

Normally, I'm saying, "look at those eyes!" about our humans, but I can't help myself. He's so cute... Look at those eyes!! And get this - he doesn't shed...a dog lover's dream.

Christine and Mike are both marathoners (and Mike is a one-time ultra-marathoner!!) and the Buffalo marathon goes right past the pier and old bridge area,which is how they came up with the first location for our shoot. We love shooting "urban landscapes!"

Hey, it almost looks warm in this photo, doesn't it? You can barely tell it was 40 degrees out. Believe me, there was no need to gently encourage Mike and Christine to get closer during any set-up.

Totally smoking!!

This is one of those great examples of what Rich is doing while I'm doing something else! My photo up, Rich's photo down :).

So, we found the one tree in the area with some leaves still on it and played around for a few minutes, because I refuse to admit it's winter. Just because the furnace is roaring away doesn't mean anything!

This was my favorite shot of Rich's... seriously, Christine and Mike are really bubbly, friendly, talkative people, and we spent the whole shoot talking! This photo is amazing. It looks like they are the only two people on Earth...even though there's a dude with a huge camera about 6 inches away!

Look at those eyes!! (okay, so Rushford didn't have the only gorgeous eyes at the pier)

Then we decided to head up to Hertel Ave to shoot a few more photos. Christine and Mike used to live in the neighborhood, so it was cool to shoot them in their old hang out. You know, if you're going to do an engagement session, make it reflect you!

Christine got the whole room-full-of-flowers proposal as a TOTAL suprise, so I thought them wanting to shoot in front of Romeo and Juliet's on Hertel was too cute! Mike is the classic romantic lead. And seriously, how jealous am I? Did I ever mention that Rich proposed to me while driving down the street. So romantic... so, I have to live vicariously through awesome proposal stories like Mike and Christine's. (Rich Edit: Good Lord, Alyssa brings this up ALL the time, you know - seeing as how we shoot couples in love for a living. Here's what really happened: I got the surpise word that I was leaving for Afghanistan (you know, war) in THREE DAYS, and so I brought it up in a conversation driving around Honolulu because I was madly, passionately in love with Alyssa and knew she was the one and didn't want to miss my chance. She agreed, and then we found out we actually had about a month to plan before I was gone over seas (I did leave three days later for training in California). I could have handled the proposal better, yes, I admit that...but now we're bickering on our blog - you did this, Alyssa! By the way, we celebrated our four year anniversary last month! :) It's been the best four years of my life.

(Alyssa re-edit: You proposed while driving the car. Now get out of my blog post!)

Here's another awesome shot of Mike and Christine Alyssa took...I'll give her back her blog post now. :)

Anyway, thanks, again, guys for coming out and braving the cold for the shoot. I know it was a bit brutal, but you guys were absolutely fantastic! We can not wait to shoot you again this spring!!