A few days ago I had the opportunity to photograph a proposal in Malibu. If you look closely it was raining.
When Jordan contacted me he saw the weather was going to be bad so he thought he should book a room at a hotel on the beach. Thinking that way the beach would be very close. When I told me the name of the hotel I looked it up on Google and took a good look at the location. The hotel was right on the beach and had large rocks sheltering the hotel from the waves. The photo of the hotel’s beach showed that there was in fact sand and an area to walk on the beach. But the question I asked myself was “was this taken at low or high tide or somewhere in between”. The shoot was booked for 11:30 am. I checked the tide tables and discovered that high tide was 10:42 am, so there would be no beach to walk on.
Fortunately, the Malibu Pier was within walking distance from their hotel. We decided we would meet at the Pier.
He did not want her to know that anything was up and asked if I could hang back and photograph them from a distance. So I was on the pier in pouring down rain about 10 minutes before their scheduled time of arrival pretending to take photos of the pier and the ocean. I checked my settings for the light and selected a place to shoot from where I could capture the best angles. I chose my Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 L series lens for the shots. It allowed me to capture close shots without being too close and to zoom out to capture shots that included more of the environment.
The Bride to be must have been wondering what was up with her boyfriend taking her to a hotel on the beach in the middle of a rainstorm.
After the proposal, she said that she had thought maybe he was going to propose to her but when she was casually rifling through his overnight bag he didn’t say anything so she guessed he was not going to propose. When he did propose to her in the middle of the downpour it was very evident that she was surprised! She said “Yes!”
I was really touched by the romance and the obvious love that they share for each other. It’s experiences like this that I treasure in my photography. So many beautiful moments that I am able to capture in the lives of the people I photograph. I am a very lucky man.
The details of the settings are as follows… Canon EOS R5, Canon 70-200mm f/2.8, shot at f/5.6, shutter 1/200 sec., ISO 640.
I decided that I wanted the finished photos to be in black and white because I felt they were meant to be in B&W. I did this in Photoshop with the use of the OnOne software.
