Ashley & Nate are ENGAGED! These two originally met at the pharmacy working side-by-side and got engaged almost a year ago last Christmas! We met them in early spring a little over a couple months later at the one Wedding Expo that we do annually at a local country club and we’ll be capturing their August 2020 wedding next year-! These two live in Goshen & Elkhart, so their big day will be at Meadow Brook Barn next year-! Since this fall was our busiest & most booked with photography in 10+ years of professional photography, we originally planned on capturing these two for their Engagement Session the night before Halloween, but as things have gone for almost every single wedding and Engagement Session this entire year, it rained a bit and we had to push the date back. These two like all of our 2020 couples live pretty busy lives with Ashley as a pharmacist working hours all over the place and Nate working 9-5, so the soonest date that they were both available was a Sunday this month in November! Luckily this was one of the very last decent days of fall this year in our area up near Lake Michigan, so we were thrilled that they got such good weather!
For their Engagement Session, Ashley & Nate chose their main 2 locations in Indiana at the barn that Ashley keeps her horses at as well as the beaches & town in Southwest Michigan (on Lake Michigan)-! We live in a tri-state area on the border of Indiana and Michigan (our city here in Indiana literally touching Michigan with Chicago, Illinois just an hour away as you round Lake Michigan), so we love capturing Engagements in Indiana, Michigan, and Chicago at Lake Michigan. We were thrilled to get to capture their well deserved year-in-the-making Engagement Session both with their animals on a private farm as well as up on Lake Michigan’s beaches-! A wonderful surprise once we started their Session on the farm was that Ashley’s mom came along with Ashley & Nate’s dog so that their pup could be a part of the Session!
We started their Engagement Session off by the barn & horses as well as with their adorable corgi. They had a little sign made for their fur baby with their wedding date on it, so we placed that around their pup’s neck to wear as they walked together as a family by one of the ponds.
The farm property had an awesome bridge, ponds, barn, fall foliage, and more, so we were pleasantly surprised by the vast array of spots that we could make it to within steps of each other-!
While at the farm we were also able to capture these two with Ashley’s newest horse (just a few stalls down from her other horse)-! We were glad that we could at least capture these two visiting with him-! It’s not every day that our couples have an equestrian in their duo and we’re glad that we had time for them to swing by and say hi to their newest animal addition!
Once finished up at the farm in South Bend, we headed over to Michigan/ Lake Michigan! There we captured these two first in the downtown area amidst all of the beautiful brick colored walls-!
By the end of their Engagement Session we had these two on the beach at Lake Michigan for sunset-! Though the sun came out throughout the day, there were clouds covering the sky for sunset, but it was still lovely with the gorgeous orange leaves, softly lit beach, and these two cuddled up!
Thank you so much Ashley & Nate for spending time with us as we captured your love (and for choosing such gorgeous spots for your Engagement Session)-! Thank you also for including your pets and having your mom come along for help with your awesome pup! We hope that you two have enjoyed looking through these images over the past week and can’t wait to print and package up your favorites for you! We’re even more excited to capture your wedding next year now-!
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Unrelated: We rescued another puppy a week & a half ago, so we’ve been potty training and life training this little under-3-month old during our current 7 day photography work weeks with the help of our rescue 5 year old Viszla dog Coco & elderly rescue calm cat Kevin-! Amidst that chaos we’ve been working diligently non-stop sending out literally thousands of newly edited photos within 2 full wedding galleries & 2 Engagement Session galleries in the past week… along with many printed photo orders from our awesome clients that we’ve been printing, packaging, and mailing OR hand delivering (due to snow and/ or clients’ preference)-! We’ve also designed 4 wedding albums & wedding invitations for a few couples in the past week, are still fulfilling tons of print orders (16 couples in total that we’re printing & designing for through December), and are finishing up editing our November LAST 2019 wedding of the year this week-!
Jenny’s family comes in this weekend for Thanksgiving, so for the first time in a long time we will NOT be working through the weekend (at least that’s what we’re telling ourselves). Throughout the 2 day weekend our new puppy Rizzo will be joining us to tailgate at Notre Dame, our other pets will stay home, our pup will get her last shot for the year, we’ll bid adieu to Amish Acres with a family meal there, and we’ll be having a family Thanksgiving meal together with about 30 relatives on Sunday night. We’re so excited to see family for the first time in at least month (or 4.5 months in some cases) and update everyone on life-! At some point we’ll also be taking a formal immediate Family Christmas Portrait, so we’ll be taking time to do that as well.
We’re hoping to send out a good amount more of finished printed orders on the final 2 days of this week & a few days next week before Thanksgiving (the full amount of orders depending on who okays Proofs and chosen photos) and are starting to email folks about needing to finish up their 2019 Wedding (or Portrait Session) printed photo choices. We still have a few more very large Christmas Portrait Sessions to capture of families of 10 to 20 members coming up closer to Christmas, so we will be finishing ALL Print Credit printed photos that come with Sessions before 2020. We also have those end-of-December edits (& prints?) to finish before then as well, so we’re taking our photography schedule pretty seriously-! This year we’re going to push pretty hard over the next month to have 2019 client work DONE and in the mail within 2019 so that we don’t get stuck again with paying business taxes on money that we have allotted for Print Credit packaging, & shipping (costs to us) for clients from this year-! Whew! We can’t wait for 2020 to be here, but in the meantime we are happily printing gorgeous albums and prints for our awesome clients-!