Music Inspired Joshua Tree Engagement Shoot

Happy New Year lovely people!!! I hope you have all had a lovely Christmas break and New Year.

If past years are anything to go by, January always brings us a surge of brand new readers who are either just starting out on their wedding planning journey after getting engaged over the festive season, or have kick started their wedding planning after taking a break. If this is you then a huge huge HUGE welcome to Festival Brides and a huge huge HUGE congratulations on your engagement! We are so excited to have you here and can’t wait to help inspire you to plan the most awesome wedding.

Over the next week or so we will be putting together a welcome feature to help you get the best out of our festival wedding pages, so please do keep your eyes peeled for this. In the meantime, you can browse through past features by selecting a category from the drop down menu above, our most popular being real weddings and styled shoots. You can also view INCREDIBLE outdoor focused wedding suppliers in our festival wedding directory and view the unique venues that we exclusively manage on our outdoor wedding venue and land hire page.

But before you do any of that, bringing in 2022 we have a fabulous engagement shoot to share with your eyes today, inspired by the couples love for music and adventure, and captured so brilliantly by Parallel33 Photography.

Engagement shoots are often considered an unnecessary expense but, if you have the budget, they can be such a great and special way to celebrate and mark your engagement. What’s more, they also serve as a wonderful opportunity for you and your partner to get comfortable in front of the camera and practice for those all important wedding day couple shots. Most wedding photographers offer packages that include engagement shoots as well giving you the chance to work with your photographer before your wedding day and to figure out the sort of images you would like captured on your wedding day.

For Ashley and Karl, the gorgeous couple we are featuring today, their engagement shoot was all about recreating how Kyle had proposed (on top of their much loved RV), representing their love and passion for music and festivals and capturing the fun loving nature of their relationship. This all took place at the awe-inspiration Joshua Tree in California.

Bree from Parallel33 Photography shares with us more details on the ideas behind Ashley and Karl’s engagement shoot.

Enjoy.

Ashley and Kyle are probably the coolest couples I’ve ever met. Haha and I mean that! Check it out: neon wigs, faux fur coats, funky glasses, dog, DJ table…

They’re funky, goofy music lovers who met at a festival, had a very unconventional engagement where they were wearing wigs while dancing on top of their RV. They wanted their engagement photos to be equally as funky (but also nice and beautiful) to commemorate their engagement.

I love what they wrote in their first email to me. I instantly knew we were gonna be homies.

“Honestly, we’re looking for a friendly vibe with someone we feel friends with! You seem right up our alley with mentions of adventuring, poppin’ champagne, and being friends so I think it’d be a good fit.

We love the warm tones of your photos, your experience making the sunsets and beautiful adventurous backgrounds pop yet let the love shine through. We LOVE the desert, we’re Burners, so the stunning sunrise/sunset moments literally take our breaths away and your photos seem to draw at that same feeling.”
Ashley and Kyle

It was meant to be, I tell ya!

HOW WE CAPTURED IT…

It was a collaborative effort to figure out the best plans for their engagement session. We really wanted their love and unique things about their relationship to shine the most! First, we decided to do a long adventure shoot, which was a blast the entire time!

We started at some BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land right outside Joshua Tree National Park, where they could camp in their RV with their puppy, Penny Lane. Kyle is a nightclub DJ, so he set up his sound system in the middle of the wild desert. He played their favorite songs while Ashley danced! This was so fun to capture. They are so wild and free-spirited!

Also, those glasses!!! SO COOL.

Kyle proposed on top of their RV under the stars at a different music festival, so we had to take some more photos of them up there!

Then, we wandered into the park along with their golden-doodle. We captured them being themselves and having a fun time. It was SUCH a blast!!!

Then at the end, we had to capture them in their infamous faux fur coats and neon wigs. Apparently they are known as the “wig people” among their friends, because they always bring a bag of wigs to parties for their friends to spice it up!

And as if it couldn’t get any better, the sunset created the most epic painted skies you’ve ever seen. It came and went in a flash, but I’m so happy we were able to pull off to the side of the road and capture the peak of nature’s beauty.

Best. Shoot. Ever.

A REMINDER TO COUPLES:

Remember your engagement session and your wedding are YOURS. That means let’s do something that represents you. Photos should show off your essence and your love, so whatever that looks like to you, I’ll be there to capture it!

Authenticity, fun, adventure, and love… that’s what it’s all about.