My jaw has dropped. I realize it’s been over 2 years since I’ve had the spirit or time to blog. It’s taken all the extraordinary insanity that makes up the year of 2020 to bring me back to a quietness in my soul, a deactivated personal Facebook account to soothe the noise in my head, and now I find all the words that I want to say and the moments that I can’t wait to share with the world.
Appropriately so, starting with Amanda and Matt. Amanda and Matt are not just “a couple” they are a force of nature to be reckoned with. I don’t even feel like referring to them as Amanda and Matt is good enough. They need, like, a SUBTITLE.
These two broke every rule for engagement portraits that I thought that I had in my head. I get asked almost daily by couples for advice on what to wear for their engagement session.
Tanya’s Rule 1: Do not mix prints. If one of you is wearing print, have the other wear a solid.
Imagine my surprise when I parked my car (okay, fine, minivan), at Cedarmont Farms in Franklin, TN, and out stepped Amanda with this insanely stunning mermaid length hair in a boho beautiful sunflower maxi dress with incredible lace details and then the opposite car door opened, and out stepped Matt (you youngsters won’t know who HawkEye is – played by Alan Alda- from the show M*A*S*H, but I watched my Dad watching TV enough to be struck DOWN by the resemblance. While editing, Matt also reminded me a little of Joaquin Pheonix, but mostly, Hawkeye), wearing, also, a print. What. This combination of outfits breaks rule #1! Matt also had his floral print button up UNBUTTONED like….3 buttons deep. (again, kids, you’ll have to use google, but I was reminded of my Mom’s crush Tom Selleck).
Don’t you love when you meet someone and they wreck you preconceptions and all that you think you know? I am pleasantly rocked that I love their prints mixed together and even more obsessed with the pop of the sunflower petals on Amanda’s dress pulling out the marigold outline of the leaves on Matt’s shirt. It’s the perfect “pull together” that you at first squint at, and then feel like you’ve unlocked one of the great mysteries of the universe and you’re so much cooler now than you ever were before.
Tanya’s Rule #2: Don’t goof off too much during your session. We want romance!
Status: BROKEN. Double broken. They goofed off THE ENTIRE time. And in that, I realized, we were not watching Pinterest, Pinterest was watching us. These two aren’t the inspired. They are the inspiration.
During all of the above moments, it dawned on me. You know those days when you aren’t having any fun and you wonder why? Like, where did all the fun go? I found it. Amanda and Matt TOOK all the fun. THEY are having ALL the FUN. So. I mean, “get bit during your engagement session” fun.
Tanya’s Rule #3: Good weather is worth the wait.
So. The days leading up to Amanda and Matt’s engagement session were rainy and gross. Not cloudy like I like, but MEAN clouds that just paint the whole day in Eeyore.
Even driving to their session, I was kicking myself for not rescheduling because it really looked like the sky could fall out at any second and I did drive through a patch of rain. We were tired of waiting for pretty weather and our hand was forced schedule-wise because Matt was deploying with the Army. So we worked with what we had. And what we ended up having, were tons of fun moments, mixed with tons of strikingly romantic moments that matched the contrast of even the weather itself- sunshine burst through raindrops like glitter and we got our very own real rainbow (aka, no photoshop).
Congratulations on your engagement, Amanda and Matt. To say that I’m excited about witnessing and capturing your wedding day would be the actual understatement of 2020.
Love, Tanya
Frozen Exposure Photo & Cinema
