Cassie & Alex's Engagement Session at Rockport Massachusetts

Cassie and Alex found me online. The first thing Cassie said when we got on the phone was that they loved my bold, colorful style. Not just that they liked my work, that they had specifically picked out that look and wanted it for their wedding day. That does not happen every day, and it got me really fired up.

When they told me they wanted to shoot in Rockport, specifically the harbor area, I understood immediately. Alex grew up here. His father ran a restaurant right down at the harbor for most of Alex's childhood, and Alex worked there himself. One of the aspects of wedding photography I love so much is that the world is my studio. I love finding a spot meaningful to the couple and turning it into our own personal canvas. We spent about an hour and a half working our way around the harbor's perimeter, starting at Cape Hedge Beach on the stone breaker, moving through the downtown stretch of Bearskin Neck, and finishing up at the Headlands on the far side of the harbor. Three very different spots, one continuous story.

Cape Hedge Beach and the Stone Breaker

We started on the granite breaker at Cape Hedge Beach with a brooding sky rolling in off the Atlantic. The sky was dark and full of clouds, which was exactly what Cassie and Alex asked for, dramatic, moody, not a soft golden afternoon. The boulders gave us a lot to work with, and the view out to sea behind them was wide open. These are the frames where you can feel the scale of the place.

Bearskin Neck

Working back inland along Bearskin Neck was a different experience entirely. It's all foot traffic down there, tiny shops, small restaurants, not a lot of room to spread out, but that intimacy is exactly what makes it interesting to shoot in. Alex pointed out the building where his father's restaurant used to be, spots where he had other jobs growing up, places that meant something to him long before Cassie was in the picture.

And then there were the locals. Over the course of the session, somewhere between six and seven different people stopped to ask what we were doing. Every single one of them lit up when we said it was an engagement session. Several of them had their own Rockport stories, got married here, grew up here, never left. One after another, they offered congratulations and stayed to talk for a minute. I've shot in a lot of places, and I've never had that happen at that frequency. It says something about the town.

The Headlands

We finished on the elevated rocky bluff on the far side of the harbor called the Headlands. From up there you can see the whole town, the Atlantic, and the inland hills behind it all. The storm clouds were still hanging over the water. It was a good place to end, wide, a little dramatic, and quieter than Bearskin Neck. Cassie and Alex were relaxed by that point, and it shows in these frames.