This may not come as a surprise to some, but Brian and I aren’t super traditional. After getting engaged, I knew we wanted to document the special time in our life with engagement photos, but the thought of coordinating sweaters in awkward posed positions just made us feel uncomfortable. We wanted to do something different. We love the beach and knew that was the location we wanted for the pics, but instead of being in casual beachwear, I thought it would be an interesting juxtaposition to wear formalwear. Then, to make it a little more fun for my fiancé and for the photos to be even less traditional- I suggested black smoke bombs. Our photog was down and I’ll never get over how beautiful they turned out.

The photos were shot during sunset at Ft.De Soto Park. It was a cold windy day, so my bare-feet were frozen standing on the sand and cement. It was totally worth it for these shots though.

I did my own makeup for the shoot and we both wore outfits that we had from a speakeasy themed New Year’s Eve event a year or so earlier. Our photog was wearing this flat brim hat, but took it off and gave it to me to use as a prop.

We got some special visitors at the end of the shoot. Two dolphins (a mom and a baby) popped up and despite living in Florida my whole life, seeing dolphins will never get old. They’re such majestic creatures and I get so excited and distracted every time I see them…as you can tell in the pic below.

I love the wood ring box that Brian had my engagement ring in, so I asked the photog to snap a pic of it.

[photos and video by: Alyson Hall Photography]

Here is a little behind-the-scenes video my photographer captured. It was the first video I ever posted to TikTok and it now has almost 30k views, which cracks me up…because I only uploaded it so I could add music to the video and save it for myself. I didn’t think anyone would actually watch it.