Salt flats engagement session | Desert engagement

If you’ve seen traditional engagement photos and aren’t really into posed shots, it makes sense that you’d plan to skip the whole thing. Then photogs like Ryan + Heidi from Forged in the North come along, and an engagement session becomes a can’t miss opportunity for a set of pics you’ll look back on forever (and brag about to everyone!). Dave + Heather felt that way, but once they heard this concept, they had to go for it—and were blown away by the result:

Ryan of Forged in the North explains…

There’s really nothing better than having newly engaged friends, with great taste, an appetite for adventure, and who are down to drive three hours into the middle of nowhere. Since we are so used to shooting in cities or dense natural environments, we really wanted to do this shoot out on salt flat to have a blank canvas kind of a feel. There’s sort of a beautiful juxtaposition of putting these warm spirited, vibrant people into this arid, unlivable climate. The color palette we went for was a split-complimentary (red, orange, blue) so we had Heather get a red/coral dress and Dave a Navy suit. The sunset gave us the most amazing soft light, which was perfect for backlighting the smoke bombs.

This dress is simply fabulous.

D + H say, Neither of us is particularly comfortable in front of the camera — it always feels a little awkward — but this experience was remarkably easy. We just followed their direction as they fired off frames. We were blown away by the final product. We’ve never looked better, and the location was magic. Ryan and Heidi absolutely crushed the shoot. We’re going to treasure the images for the rest of our lives. It’s a special thing knowing that when we’re old and grey, we’ll be able to show our children that there was a time when we looked really fantastic. (Pretty sure these two will always look fantastic, btw!)