Marisa + Zach | Engaged
An Abbey Nature Preserve Engagement Session
This engagement session was definitely one for the books! With all that we endured the hour and a half we were together for this session, THESE GUYS deserve the biggest award for being the BEST sports about it all! I truly don’t know of another couple that could come out of a 2 mile, hour long hike and look as good as they did in the middle of a back woods NC summer!
Marisa + Zach MAYYYY look a little familiar if you follow my blogs from past weddings pretty closely! Marisa has been a bridesmaid in at least 3 (that I can think of right off) past weddings I have done! AND ITS OFFICIALLY HER TIME TO SHINE!!!!! When she reached out and said that she was engaged and wanted me to photograph her wedding, it was the QUICKEST YES! I LOVVVVEEEEEE being able to work with people that I already know, it just makes it all so much sweeter!
Fast forward to planning their engagement session, they decided on The Abbey Nature Preserve trails in Wilmington, NC!
Funny story….I keep saying we had this long walk before we started the session, so let me explain! I personally have never been to these trails, so I didn’t really know what to expect! Marisa and Zach have been there a handful of times, but they always go to a different part of the trail ( because its so big) but it was closed! Mikaela ( another past bride, you can find her blog post here: Mikaela + Stanley’s Lake Wedding — Sam Wynn Photography (squarespace.com) I loved being able to see her again!!) who came to help wrangle dogs, also had been there but from a different way! So we all were blindly walking into these woods hoping it ended up in this magical location. Spoiler alert….it didn’t HAHA! When I say woods…I mean WOODS. Thick tree cover. It was hot and sticky. If you stopped for 2 seconds you had about 86 mosquitos on you. Marisa had on a dress, heels and her hair and make up was done. Zach had on nice clothes. And here all 4 of us are with 3 dogs hiking in these woods! About 45 minutes later we did eventually find a bridge that we were able to stop at and do some portraits that were so fun with their pups! Instead of hiking further into these woods, I decided we should go back to the parking lot and use that! Our sun was getting really low, and the parking lot was honestly beautiful! So then we had about a 40 minute hike back to the parking lot lol!
I love that we can all now look back at this and say WHAT an adventure we had on that day! It was definitely unique, and I tried to make it as special as possible.
The parking lot to this trail and a small field next to it was actually a God send. This just goes to show as long as I have good light, I rea can make any location work! Marisa + Zach had the best attitude the whole time when they easily could have just threw in the towel. We laughed. We burned lots of calories. I got to know them better outside of others wedding days I have seen them at, and I got to meet the sweetest 3 pups they have. You can tell that these two were made for each other. They just look at each other and exude so much love and happiness. They are down for any crazy idea I have, and I have to say I was down for any crazy idea they had HAHA!
I love that we have the memory of this day to look back on, so that on their wedding day in December we can be thankful for the cooler weather we were begging for months ago on this day :)
Enjoy looking at some of my favs from our evening, and reading about everything we went through before these photos EVEN happened! <3 You would never be able to tell!
