This photo shoot started out as a plan to visit the Monahans Sandhills State Park and take “couples photos” of each other. Stephanie and I had talked about planning a 2016 trip here sometime last year – Stephanie mentioned that she and Bradley were wanting to take a small mini-vacation in May to see the Monahans Sandhills and they invited Michael and I to join them. I was pretty excited because we had been talking about going and now we were putting those plans into action. Stephanie planned what we were going to wear for photos and how we were going to go sledding down the sand dunes! Little did I know that Stephanie, Bradley, and Michael had a slightly different plan.

We leave the night before and take the six-hour drive to West Texas so that we can get sunrise portraits on the dunes. The next morning, we wake up and get dolled up for our photos and head to Monahans Sandhills State Park with cameras and sleds ready to go!

Once we get there Stephanie goes “I want to take y’alls photos first!” So she starts to set Michael and me up on the top of a huge sand dune. Definitely living the model life at this point! Halfway through the photo shoot, Stephanie poses Michael and me back to back. I thought this was odd, but just went with it – we are artists, there’s always a vision! After this Stephanie tells me to turn around. When I do I notice Michael, down on one knee, with the most beautiful ring ever in his hand. THEY PLANNED A SURPRISE PROPOSAL TOGETHER! Right then and there, Michael proposed and of course I said “YES,” after laughing so hard from how they pulled off this whole thing! Apparently, Michael had contacted them a few months earlier and asked them to invite us to the dunes for a day and to plan some sort of photo shoot to throw me off my game. Genius – I seriously had NO IDEA!

We finished up the shoot, which was now an engagement shoot (hooray) and then I still got a chance to take some couples portraits of Stephanie and Bradley. This place was a total dream location for pictures! Here are some of my favorites from the shoot!

(To see my full engagement story and to learn the crazy story on how we met and became friends with Stephanie and Bradley, click here).