Lake Tahoe Engagement

In October, we took a long road trip from the Colorado Rockies to the California Sierras for Anika and Mihir’s Lake Tahoe engagement.

We were also in town to photograph the couple’s wedding just two days later, but since we live three states apart, we decided to do the engagement session and wedding in one trip, back-to-back.

We had been to Lake Tahoe a few times before to go skiing, but this was our first time working there, which meant a little pre-scouting was in order. Our first step was to reach out to our photographer friend, Nicky, who lives in the area. Nicky and I both studied photojournalism at Central Michigan University in the early 2000s, and now we’re both wedding photographers, so we’ve kept in touch over the years. Nicky gave us all sorts of great location recommendations, including a couple of her “secret” spots.

Step two was Google Map scouting. We like to drop into “street view” to check out what the area looks like, find parking, and time our routes. During this phase, we were able to narrow it down to three or four locations we knew we wanted to check out.

We arrived in town during a torrential downpour, so we threw on our rain jackets for step three: in-person scouting. The excitement began to build as we spent the afternoon walking around our locations and getting ideas for the shoot. We knew immediately that we were in for a real treat with this Lake Tahoe engagement session.

We started the session at sunrise the following day and photographed for the next eight hours or so. We were also working together with our videographer friends, The Cinelums, who we met at the Cocktail Conference in France earlier this year. This made for a super fun, collaborative shoot during which we would try out an idea then The Cinelums would step in and create their magic, and so on.

After the session concluded, it was off to Truckee Brewing Company to start going through the images and getting ready for Anika and Mihir’s Haldi the next day, and the wedding the day after that. Stay tuned for those photos (coming very soon), but in the meantime, scroll down to check out the engagement session!