Another fun session in downtown LA!

I feel like everytime I step into downtown there’s a new little nook to explore and a little more buzz and vibrancy to the city – it’s constantly changing and I love it! I have a friend who recently purchased a shiny new loft in the heart of downtown, and on a recent visit, he explained of possible light rail installations, the restoration of Broadway & all the theaters that line it, all the new restaurants and bars that are popping up – it makes me super excited to think that one day our little downtown may join the ranks of other bustling city centers (SF? Chicago? NYC?) and be the cool place to hang :)

On that note, downtown was such a perfect spot for Jackie & Glen’s session! :) I love their nod towards pretty vintage style and how they subtly brought that into the session. As we strolled through Angel’s Knoll Park {insert squeals about 500 Days of Summer & JGL! JGL! here}, they described their love of all things vintage and how they go antique store-hopping on the weekends. So sweet!

Meenah & Shaobo live in Norcal and booked me after a meeting on Skype, so I was super excited to meet them in person for the first time at their engagement session! For their session, they suggested a sweet seaside beach picnic, complete with lots of pops of color and fun beachy activities. I’ve seen picnic engagement sessions before but never on a beach – I love the summery casual feel the sand & the sea lent to this session!

They drove down to LA with a car full of colorful candies (confetti-inspired shots galore!), bubbles, sodas, and two of the loveliest fabric kites I had ever seen, handcrafted beautifully by Meenah. They didn’t quite fly, but with the general selection of Batman/pirate/the Hulk-themed kites out there, this was an excellent decision of form over function :)

I loved this fun summertime session & am SO excited for their beautiful vineyard wedding this fall!

When Elisa mentioned incorporating her love of reading into their session, 2 images immediately popped into my head – one was of them standing among stacks & stacks of vintage books, a million feet tall, looming all around them like crazy book-skyscrapers. The second vision was them laying on a blanket, with tons of books again, except this time they were swimming in them. Either way, I figured we would need a googelplex of books.

So the next couple weeks were spent collected hardcovers, coming across gems from the 1940s from my dad, with the corners of the pages all brittle & yellow, and the prettiest collection of novels {those would be all the pastel ones you see} from Scott’s mom. I was seriously driving around town with bags & bags & bags of books in my car and it sort of made me crazy excited that I pretty much was in a mobile library & at any given time I could just stop and read them ALL (didn’t happen, but exciting nonetheless). And though, by the time the session came around, we didn’t end up with quite enough books to tower 18 stories above Elisa & Andrew or to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool, I was quite super giddy with the more realistic versions of brainstorming that we brought to life!

But Elisa must have figured that super giddy wasn’t quite giddy enough, because she had a second genius idea up her sleeve. She brought to the session a handcrafted GIGANTIC red heart kite. A kite. That was a red heart. That she put together, WITH HER HANDS. It was perfect & combined with Elisa & Andrew’s super sweet & silly personalities, it made for the funnest of fun photos. GIDDY X 1000!