Erica Stephens Photography: Tim + Courtney: Engaged!! {Lancaster, Ca engagement photographer}

Although this was an engagement session, it was the first of it's kind for me... because the engagement happened during the session! And what made it more exciting was it was my baby brother proposing to his girlfriend of two years (who we love and are so excited is going to be a part of our family)!

Timmy (Ok yeah so he may be 25 but I will always call him Timmy...) came to me with his idea of how he wanted to propose, and of course I jumped on board. He wanted to do a "photo shoot" and then in the middle of the session he wanted to propose, so that the whole thing was captured on camera. We came up with a location and elaborate plan so that Courtney wouldn't think anything of it. We were going to go out to a spot in Lake Hughes that I photographed at before the fire, but haven't been to since it burned down. We were going to do a "tester" shoot to make sure that the area photographed nicely "before I took paying customers out there." Timmy brought the ring over the night before and we hid it in my camera bag, and decided that after a few pictures I would ask Timmy to "get me a new memory card" out of my bag, and he would grab the ring. Perfect plan, right?

I woke up the morning of feeling like crud. I have felt sick for a good portion of this pregnancy. I felt so badly that Dathan took the day off work and sent me back to bed. But I couldn't cancel/reschedule on Timmy, he was already nervous enough as it was. So I sent him a text saying "don't freak out, but I'm sick. I don't need to be hiking through the middle of nowhere, so what if we went to the location you shoot at to a practice shoot since I've never shot there?" Timmy is a photographer as well and showed me this awesome location and so the story worked perfectly and we had it all planned out. Poor Timmy was so nervous, I only took a couple photos before I "asked for my memory card" because I don't know if he could have handled it much longer ;)