A bit of a departure from my recent shoots, this one was in White Sands National Park, was Moroccan-inspired, and was an elopement!
The feeling I wanted to come across in these photos was as if you were in a dream where Aladan is singing about how he can show you the world. I wanted to create a balanced warm to cool palette achieved by a time transition from golden hour to blue hour. We were lucky enough to see both, and the colors bounced off the white sand wrapping the couple in these gorgeous colors.
To get a lot of these shots, we had to hike up and down sand dunes. These two were so sweet about it they were down to do whatever it took to get the shot even when I sounded mildly crazy saying one dune was preferable to another. I had this vision in my head when I started planning this shoot to find the best dune to get a cliff shot, to perch them on the tip of the dune to make it look like it was them against the world! They indulged my desire, and in the end, we achieved amazing distance shots that look like we went to the end of the world.
Aside from the practicality of it, I encouraged the bride to barefoot with me! The sand was incredible; it was a soft powder, like walking on powdered sugar.
As this was an elopement, I had a lot of other beautiful setups and details to photograph. The bride and groom chose sunset orange and teal blue as accent colors that were in the table setup, cake frosting, ribbons, and foliage accents in the decor. These colors blended perfectly with golden hour and contrasted beautifully with blue hour; the sky got the memo and dressed appropriately that day!
TIP OF THE DAY!
If you're shooting an elopement or a setup that includes food, then make sure to put the food out at the last second. We had an incident when the cake started to melt and droop. We tried to push it back into place, but the hot sun is a formidable foe. However, we made it work; in the pictures, the droop just gave it more character!