Our Engagement Photos | Documented by Boy Girl Beauty World

March 15th. A year ago today, Dustin asked me to be his wife atop a Californian ridge above Malibu’s Paradise Falls. The moments leading up to this moment weren’t the most glamorous; Ayden had spent the night before throwing up in our hotel room and the front desk didn’t have a housekeeping key to give us new bedding until the morning. We snuggled him up on a sheetless bed with us and tended to him through the night. The next morning, we decided to go for a light hike to get us all some fresh air after the chaotic travel and lack of sleep. We took our time getting to the waterfall, taking many hydration break for Ayden and swapping him out on our shoulders. Then on our way back up, Dustin asked to take a group picture of us all. Being a photographer, I shot him down and said, “yeah, no, the light sucks.” I turned around and found him on one knee with his Grandma Jeannine’s anniversary ring. After my shocked, “is this real?” moment, I exclaimed, “YES!”

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Now we’re less than 200 days away from our wedding day in September!!! As a celebration, I’m sharing some of our favorite frames from our engagement session with Boy Girl Beauty World. Dylan and Marisa are an absolute dream to work with. I cannot over emphasize that it is SO important to choose a photographer (or photo duo!) that you have good chemistry with! We feel so comfortable and at ease with Dylan and Marisa, so there’s zero awkwardness. As a photographer myself, most of my brides and grooms tend to be people I would actually hang out with in real life, and vice versa. If you don’t feel like you could be friends with each other, how could you be vulnerable enough in front of someone’s camera!? Needless to say, we know we made the right choice in hiring Marisa and Dylan, and we cannot wait to have them with us all day on our wedding!

We invited Dylan and Marisa over for Beyond Burgers (vegan and AMAZING) at our previous, quaint house in the back of a neighborhood in Baraga. The house wasn’t exactly Instagram or Pinterest perfection. In fact, there was SO much clutter at the time of the session, but we wanted to document this crazy time in our lives! Nerf bullets, piles of things to be organized, legos, and all! At the time, we didn’t realize we would be moving into a new house a couple of months after, so we are SO happy we opted for a few photos of what this chapter looked like!

Our wedding is centered around places that hold a lot of meaning to Dustin, so we centered our engagement photos around places that hold meaning to me. My dad grew up in a little Ford town about eight miles outside of L’Anse known as Alberta. Because of this, much of my life was spent jumping off the cliffs at Canyon Falls and dirt biking until we ran out of gas on the sandy trails of the Baraga Plains.

We originally wanted to go deep into the Baraga Plains, but by the time we hiked out of Canyon Falls, we were already chasing the final rays of sunlight with another important location in mind. We made a quick stop in a grassy patch in a gravel pit that my family uses to unload our dirt bikes.

Our final location would’ve been the location Dustin proposed if he didn’t have the opportunity in California (he didn’t know where he would’ve hid the ring from me if his sister didn’t come with and hide it in her suitcase!). There’s a discontinued railroad trestle where the rails have been pulled but the bridge is otherwise intact where we like to hang out when we want to get away from the rest of the world and just be.