Engagement Photos at Picnic Island // K+C

Shooting engagement photos at Picnic Island park always brings a little sense of normalcy, it’s like home base for me. An hour to unplug and create beautiful images with beautiful people. A little escape from reality if you will. Although this engagement session was a much needed break from the real world, it did have one element that was totally new to me, Sahara dust. Yeah, you read that right. It is 2020 after all, is anything surprising anymore? When we first starting shooting Kaytee and Chad’s engagement photos at Picnic Island park, obviously it was super hot and humid, but my camera was picking up a haze in all of the images. At first I thought the humidity was so dense that it must be registering on my camera. The more I thought about it the more I was confused about what the heck was going on. I’ve been shooting through humid Florida summers for over 10 years now and this weird haze has never happened before. Then it hit me, THE FREAKIN’ DUST STORM! Yup, that was it. The Sahara dust storm that moved across the North Atlantic to the US was here and it was really making itself at home in my images. What was strange is that outside the camera just looking around you really couldn’t tell too much difference in the air quality. But once the sun started to set that totally changed. There was so much dust in the air it was completely blocking the sun to where you could stare right at it without hurting your eyes. If you tried to do that during a normal sunset you’d be blind in .2 seconds. The dust made the sun look like the moon. It was crazy! With all that said, it’s rare I run into new challenges shooting after all of these years but alas I stand corrected. Kaytee and Chad were so much fun to work with and so adventurous throughout all the heat and dust, I couldn’t have picked a better couple to photograph in the midst of a dust storm!