I have to admit, although I knew the engagement session with Ellen and Aaron last Friday was going to be flippin’ awesome, I was also a little nervous about it as well. Ellen’s also a photographer and mentioned how important photography was to her. I was very honored and completely excited when she first contacted me about shooting her wedding. One great thing about photographing photographers is that you know they’ll do pretty much ANYTHING for a good photo. One bad thing is that they’ll know when something’s going wrong. haha
Ellen and Aaron were both born and raised in Atlanta and both studied at Georgia Tech. I wanted to paraphrase their proposal story, but I didn’t want to leave anything out!
In the mayhem of work that capped off Aaron’s fall ’09 semester, he unexpectedly asked Ellen to climb Stone Mountain with him to escape from his cubicle for a while. Huddled together against the cold, they watched a crazily red/orange sunset that made the whole side of the mountain glow warmly. Aaron had the progression of scriptures the Lord had given them over the past 6 months – through highs and lows, uncertainties and revelations – marked in his bible and read each passage in order. He then gave Ellen a small wooden box which he had adorned with a copper tree (a symbol for both of their lives) and words made of copper “Will you be my true love?” (True is Aaron’s last name and means ‘Great Tree’ in old English). Squealing with delight, Ellen tackled Aaron and they were laughing on the ground when Aaron asked her to be his wife, and she accepted. After several minutes of laughing and screaming “Thank you Jesus!!!”, they returned upright to look at the ring – a complete surprise and the most perfect, beautiful ring Ellen had ever seen. “Its perfect! It’s what I thought didn’t exist!”, she thought. And the Lord spoke to her in that moment “Just like Aaron.” They prayed and took communion as their first act within engagement, swigging from the wine bottle and enjoying gouda and apples and love in the chilly night.
More photos to come soon from their session.