Engagement Photos | Spencer’s Butte Eugene Oregon | Jordan & Brendan

Man, I’ve lucked out this year with some incredible shoots! For this one, Jordan and Brendan contacted me from the great state of Michigan to inquire about engagement photos. They were headed to Oregon for a friend’s wedding and wanted to get their engagement photos done while they were here. They wanted trees, mountains, views; somewhere special. And, the best part, they were willing to work for it!

I was very honored to get to do this shoot, especially since Jordan is an awesome wedding photographer herself! It’s such a huge compliment to me when other photographers want me to do photography for them!

So, we made grand plans, came up with amazing ideas, and set it all into motion on an early morning in September. When I say early, I mean I woke up shortly after 4am and got ready. Headed out to get coffee but had to wait until Starbucks opened. When you’re too early for a coffee shop, that’s serious business! Got a little bit of caffeine to wake me up and then headed to Spencer’s Butte to hike in the dark. When it’s that early, you can’t park in the parking lot so we had to park on a street 1/4 mile away and hike from there. We used headlamps and flashlights to make our way up the butte. I carried as much as I could to help keep the couple from getting too sweaty before photos. We got to the top right at dawn and cooled down a bit. We had about 1.5 hours until anyone else would be there. And we took full advantage of that time!

Once people started showing up at the top, we made our way downhill and shot photos at a few spots on and off the trail during our hike back. I shot a couple of rolls of film on this trip too and some of the film shots are my favorite. Kodak Ektar 100 pushed +1 stop and processed by Indie Film Lab in case you’re wondering. I then based some of the tones from the digital shots off of the film scans to keep things congruent. Loving the results!