It’s not every day that you get to celebrate the love of two of your favourite people.

When Will and Amal reached out about doing an engagement session in the beautiful forests of Squamish, I immediately knew the spot I wanted to take them to. We had a specific window of time to fit in the shoot, due to other long weekend commitments and a need to get their wedding site up ASAP, so we elected for a midday shoot – despite this not necessarily being the best time of day to get that golden-hour lighting that brings the magic sparkle to elopement shoots in the mountains. For location scouting, that necessitated somewhere with shade from the harsh sunlight, and that would keep the couple cool and comfortable. With BC wildfire smoke hanging in the air, I knew that getting down to the waterside would be our best bet for mitigating the humidity of the day.

As it turns out, the heat didn’t phase us one bit. The destination suited the couple perfectly. With both parties having made BC their chosen home, they had an innate love of the spectacular nature to be found here, but didn’t want to hike too far to a remote location. However, they were still up for a bit of an adventure scramble to get to the right spot! Amal changed into runners for the hike down, and navigated the steeper sections of the trail like a pro, hiking up her dress as needed and skirting round loose rocks with Will to lend a helping hand.

“From the bottom of my fucking heart, thank you! I cried many times looking through these.”

– Will

After snapping some gorgeous riverside images down in the canyon, we ventured deeper into the forest, weaving our way through old-man’s beard (also know as beard moss, or usnea) to find our second location. Some back-light from the sun combined with the power of my trusty golden reflector ensured perfect lighting on the couple. And the reflector perfectly doubled as an oversized fan to waft at Will and Amal and cool them down after the hike (full service Squamish engagement photographer, here ✋).

One of my favourite moments from the day was watching Amal give not a second thought to dirtying up the hem of her dress to dab beads of sweat off Will’s brow. And getting to bear witness to the love these two share was pretty powerful.

Overall, the day was an absolute delight and resulted in some gorgeous images created on our adventures together! I can’t wait to see these two tie the knot next summer.

♾️