Wendi & Josh's KC Scottish Rite Engagement Session

Can I be honest with you for a minute? We keep a lot of tools up our sleeves for our client sessions. We work with on-camera flash for everything: engagements, weddings, corporate events, even during family photos outside on a sunny day. We keep a wide variety of lenses in our camera bag that all do different things and give us a different feeling that we use for specific ideas and images. We use reflectors, light bounces, and scrims when necessary. We’re constantly scanning and reading articles and the internet for new inspiration and ideas to keep things fresh and interesting. But if I’m being completely honest? Despite everything that we use to make our images as great in-camera as we can, we haven’t been 100% happy with how things have been turning out lately. It’s not that they’re not beautiful, or good, or even that our clients don’t like them. We’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching lately, trying to refine our style a little bit more to better tell our clients’ stories. And, over the last few months, we think we’re finally starting to hit the nail on the head.

This brings us to Wendi and Joshua’s engagement session that we did earlier this spring here in Kansas City. If you’ve been keeping up with our blog, you know that our winter and spring have been filled with travel and new destinations. This engagement session was one of the first that we’ve done in Kansas City this year, and we set a few new goals for ourselves (in addition to the ones we discussed with Wendi and Josh) than we normally do. Kyle’s challenge was to limit himself to using only one lens during their session instead of the normal two-five that he goes through. He also (insert big surprised gasp/jaw on the floor here) wanted to use natural light. That’s right – natural light during an engagement session. Something I can honestly say that we’ve never done in all of our eight years doing this. My goal was to be less of a chatterbox, and to just let things happen naturally.

Back to Wendi and Josh. During our planning meeting, Wendi mentioned that Joshua is a caretaker for a few lodges in the Kansas City area, and that she thought it would be neat if we could maybe do a few images in one of them, since it would mean so much to him. We were game, even though we weren’t really sure what we were getting into. A few days before their engagement session, Kyle met Josh at the Scottish Rite Temple in Kansas City, just off Linwood Boulevard, and man, he was completely blown away. When he came home from his scouting trip, he had about 100 different ideas for their engagement session. When their session day finally rolled around we were antsy to get back behind the camera to work on our new goals, and to make some beautiful images for this sweet couple. Normally when I post blogs I don’t always post images in the order that they were taken, but skip around a little bit. This session is all posted in chronological order, and man, the first few shutters out of the gate were just killer! Joshua and Wendi were absolute troopers, and were so very patient with Kyle’s creative brain going into overdrive in this beautiful building. Keeping things simple for us really worked out well, and the results were engagement images unlike any that we’ve ever taken before. We are absolutely in LOVE with how Wendi and Joshua’s engagement session turned out, and are so glad that they felt the same way. Hazy, romantic, all with a little bit of drama. Wendi and Joshua are getting married this October, and while we’re so sad that we won’t be able to be there to celebrate with them, we’re so grateful and appreciative of the time that we’ve gotten to spend with them over the last few months getting to know them and enjoying their company. There’s no doubt in my mind that these two have many, many, many years of laughter and fun-filled travels ahead of them. Thank you so much, Wendi and Josh!