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This engagement session almost didn't happen! When we planned to shoot Holly & Sam's engagement session, it was originally supposed to take place at a cider mill, with beautiful fall colors. However, a huge storm with chilling high winds rolled in that day and changed our plans. I was watching the doppler radar via Internet all day long and determined that we should find a location that would allow us to utilize natural light, while still being covered from the elements. My choice: Belle Isle, with its beautiful conservatory and covered porch around the casino building. I started getting tons of ideas about all of these great shots we could do that would incorporate raindrops, the conservatory settings, etc. However, plans had to change yet again when I arrived early to find that the conservatory was under renovation that day. Talk about bad luck!! Despite all of this, the show HAD to go on because I wasn't going to be back in Michigan for a while!!

Even under the covered porch of the building, it was incredibly windy on all but one side. Fortunately, all of that wind was pushing the storm out of the area, so the rain finally stopped, but it was still FREEEZING!! Holly & Sam were such troopers about braving the cold!! I made sure we took several “warm-up” breaks by driving around in the car with the heat on.

Once the sun broke through a few clouds, the sky and lighting were AMAZING!!! It made weathering the storm and sticking to our plans totally worthwhile.

(for some reason, cross-processed images feel very “Detroit” to me)

The wind was an issue from time to time, but we found ways to make it work for us.

Normally I don't like really “dark” images, but I think I was inspired to create some after we had such a dark day.

When I was planning on rain, I had made some really cool plans to shoot through a rainy car window among some other awesome ideas (that I'll have to try with another couple), but with no rain drops on the windows, I quickly changed plans and created the shot below and the cool rear-view mirror shot inside the car where we were nice and warm! Despite all of the challenges leading up to our shoot… I would have to say that this was a total success!!

Technical notes for photographers: None of the images above were Photoshopped other than sharpening for Web and adding my logo. All of the post-processing work was done in Adobe Lightroom Beta. If you'd like to see the original straight from camera JPEG images, CLICK HERE to view the entire set of processed and unprocessed images on Flickr.