July 25, 2016 /
Ali & Johnny's KATY Trail Engagement Pictures
Friends, meet Ali and Johnny. They are two of the sweetest, nature-loving, outgoing, fun, big hearted people that you’ve ever met. EVER. They’re also two of the hardest working people that you’ll ever meet. This summer Ali was going to school, working fulltime, planning her wedding, and helping Johnny get ready for his deployment. Since they’re getting married in Kansas City, they knew they wanted to do their session closer to home in Central Missouri. You know what this means – yay for a mini road-trip!! Ali and Johnny didn’t care where we shot, as long as it was someplace outside surrounded by trees and nature.
So, on one of the hottest days of the summer, we drove down to Columbia for their engagement session. At Ali and Johnny’s recommendation, we started their shoot at Rock Bridge Memorial State Park, just outside of Columbia. There are tons of beautiful trails through the hills, and also a ton of caves. After hiking for a while, Kyle asked Ali and Johnny to brave one of the caves on the path, the Devil’s Icebox. What is it? A staircase that goes all the way down into the earth. As you descend the temperature and humidity starts to drop. By the time we got down to the actual cave it was probably all of 65 degrees outside. The really cool thing about this cave is that there’s a slit at the top of the cave by where the stairs start, so of course Kyle wanted to shoot down using that slit.
After we finished up at Rock Bridge, we headed to a spot just outside of Columbia on the KATY trail to catch sunset. We had NO idea when we chose this location that we would get this great of a sunset, however. One of Ali’s ideas for their engagement session included doing a few images of Johnny in his military uniform. Johnny took it one step further, and asked to incorporate Ali’s grandfather’s flag. Between the sunset, Johnny in his uniform, gorgeous Ali, and the oh-so obvious love between these two, these are easily some of our favorite engagement pictures from the whole year.
