Today we’d love to share with you Cassie & Jimmy’s Sunset Engagement Session from the 2nd day of Summer this June! Their Session had to be rescheduled twice due to all of the weekend rain (more on that later in this blog), but luckily there was a sudden unexpected break in the rain on Saturday, so we all went for it and resheduled our Saturday plans to ensure that we could capture their Engagement finally! Cassie and Jimmy had scouted out the motocross spot in the morning that day and since it’s our favorite park, we knew the 2nd spot (forest at a park) inside and out, so upon arrival we immediately took them to the area we think is most like a dense rain forest. Without further adieu, Cassie & Jimmy’s Engagement Session!
Luckily there were minimal amounts of mosquitoes there at the park near sunset and there were even butterflies swarming around all of us! It was surreal with the random butterflies landing on us! We had these two head down one of our favorite paths, hang out on a log in the woods, then come back out onto the park’s path/ street and play around there.
Cassie and Jimmy are local so luckily we first got to meet with them in person last year at our Consultation Office in South Bend! We originally started chatting with Cassie via email at the start of last September about their 2019 South Bend wedding, so by the time we photograph their wedding in November it will have been a full year and a couple months of getting to know them!
Jimmy does motocross, so during our in-person meeting with them we’d joked about him riding his dirt bike over Cassie or him doing a nose wheelie (back tire up/ front tire on ground) up to Cassie so that they could kiss. We were all kind of joking, but then got excited about the ideas and wanted to make them happen (through the photo magic of perspective)! Due to the rain and rescheduling they thought that maybe we’d have to forego the dirt bike portion altogether, but we thought that that was such an interesting and unique part of them and their relationship, so we wanted to do anything to ensure that they could still do it! We love how it all turned out and how it uniquely shows a part of their relationship/ interests!
We love how laid back these two are and love how open they are with us. Cassie sent over photos of her favorite wedding dresses in January, then her final wedding dress choice right after that! Cassie was so sweet this week during their Session and gave us really cool customized water bottles during their Session that she made for us! (They’re pretty funny and “on brand” with all of our humor too- an added bonus!)
We really loved getting to hang out with you two again, Cassie & Jimmy! Thank you so, so much for rolling with the punches when the weather was terrible last weekend and being open to rescheduling twice within a week to take advantage of a surprise sunny day! haha We did it!! We hope that you love these photos as we continue to edit your entire Engagement Session this week and we can’t wait to see what photos you choose for us to print for you (for the prints that also come with your Session)!
___Semi Unrelated:
This coming weekend in just a few days we get to photograph Kaitlyn & Colin’s Notre Dame wedding! We have some unknown factors as of now (whether the construction of the Grotto will be finished & whether it will rain or not- two things we’ll have a better grasp on by the time we scout locations on Friday), but we’re so excited to capture these two all day at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on campus as well as at the Morris Inn for their prep in the morning and reception in the evening! There will even be a beautiful Sparkler Exit at the end of their big day, so we’re leaving a bit early, heading 5 minutes home, packing the car for Michigan, then coming back to capture them leaving their reception with a beautiful sparkler lined path later that evening! We love to do this for our couples because it feels incomplete not including a beautiful grand exit if there happens to be one at the end of the night, so we tend to throw that in if possible (after going home to let our dog out, feed our pets, and take some some gear out of the car that we no longer need for the night exit photos).
If you’ve been following the weddings and Engagement Sessions that we’ve been photographing over the past 2 months you’ll have noticed the mention of rain in every. single. blog post. It seems like we now have a “Monsoon Season” here in South Bend, Indiana/ the Midwest (thanks, Climate Change)! It’s actually felt a bit like Seattle here this Spring/ start of Summer with LITERALLY every weekend for the past 8 weekends or so having called for pouring down rain in the forecast for every minute of every weekend after already rainy weeks with maybe one sunny day if we’re lucky. LUCKILY most of the weekend forecasts have been completely wrong when we get to those actual days and have been only about 5% accurate about the pouring down rain which we’ve been so, so thankful about. Our Nashville couple Malyssa & Dakota if you remember came up from their home in Nashville for a beach Engagement Session up here which called for pouring down rain the entire weekend making us very stressed and have an indoor back-up plan as we were glued to the forecast. It actually didn’t rain at all thankfully because if it had rained every minute of all 3 of those days (as predicted in the forecast) then we would have been extremely sad since they came all the way from Tennessee and would had to have had their photos indoors.
The same forecast has been given to us for literally everyone’s weddings and Engagement Sessions over the past couple months though (calling for full thunderstorms and pouring rain forecasts for all weekends, then no rain comes then… rather rains on all of the following weekdays). Only Cassie & Jimmy got a semi correct weather forecast of pouring down rain a week & a half ago which lead to canceling and rescheduling their Session-! We couldn’t move their Engagement Session to the indoors because theirs involved a dirt bike and motocross- something we thought was unique enough to them that we wanted to ensure including it and the forest in! Not only did their Engagement Session day get rained out the first time around, but it literally poured from 11:45 a.m. to sunset that day. The next day had rain on and off, so we rescheduled their Engagement Session to this past weekend and held our breath all week since their Engagement Session was scheduled for Sunday and it AGAIN called for pouring down rain all of Saturday, Sunday, and Monday!
After all of us impatiently waited it out (literally the only thing you can do in these situations), the forecast changed Saturday morning to show NO rain on Saturday, but still showed rain for Sunday. We were up in Michigan on Saturday, but chatted with these two that morning and decided to reschedule a 2nd time to ensure no rain for their Engagement Session. If we based it off of the past weekends, the forecast would likely change for their date of Sunday as well, but we didn’t want to chance it (and we’re glad we did since it was cloudy that day, then rained from 6 pm through 8 pm). We scrambled back Saturday evening to Indiana, charged up more camera batteries, changed clothes, and headed over to meet these two at a beautiful park that we’d never gotten to photograph any other couples at yet!
We were so excited that we finally got good weather for their sunset Session: half hour in the forest at the park and then a half hour at a motocross track (originally set to be their family farm, but it was grown over due to the intense rain over the past couple months, so it was moved to their friend’s secluded track)! We hope that you enjoyed checking out their Engagement Session and we can’t wait to capture their big day in a little over 4 months!