For Angela & Fong’s engagement session, we started off at the Venice canals. The canals are on the west side, practically in my backyard, and as much as I’ve always wanted to visit them, I somehow never had until their session. It’s pretty random when you stumble across them, you’re driving along, on what appears to be an ordinary road in an ordinary neighborhood, and BAM! Water where streets should be. The whole area was sunny & refreshing & quaint and I loved photographing them along the canals and the little alleyways between them. We rounded out our Venice session by heading down to Abbot Kinney for some colorful shots and finished up at the beach.

Angela & Fong are the sweetest couple {and as you’ll see below, pretty darn ridiculously good looking} – I can’t wait for their wedding at the Turnip Rose 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!

There is a well-known pathway at UCLA known as Bruinwalk. It is probably the most frequented route to get to class – a wide walkway lined with tables, where members from campus clubs sit, hang out, chat, and bombard you mercilessly with flyers. I have fond memories of both handing out flyers (I know, GUILTY AS CHARGED), and strategically avoiding being flyered to (the secret is in pretending your phone/ipod ear buds are surgically attached to your head.)

But for Yessica & Fernando, Bruinwalk holds even more fond memories. It is where they met and had their first conversation, sitting at one of the flyer-laden tables. And years later, it is where Fernando brought Yessica back, to relax together, to reminisce, and to ask to be his wife :)

They are the sweetest couple, and I loved photographing them at the campus where they met and fell in love!