Here is another case of “We just did the engagement shoot, and I’d better get the images out because the wedding is tomorrow!” It does have a certain efficiency to it.

Karen and Kamil have flown me out to California to document their Malibu wedding, and if I thought I was excited before, I’ve reached Ludicrous Excitement after how much fun our engagement shoot was at their alma mater, Harvey Mudd College.

Have you ever seen Real Genius? If not, go rent it. It’s one of the best movies of all time. If you have, though, you remember a scene with a dorm literally bursting with anarchic, geeky energy in every corner. A place like this could only exist in the movies, right?

Wrong. West Dorm, where both Karen and Kamil spent all four years, surpasses every stereotype of every college movie I’ve ever seen. There are pirate flags, and bonfires, and motorcycles, and shopping carts with Pabst Blue Ribbon cup holders. It is college at its most primal, both revelled in and enjoyed ironically.

For the first time, I actually can’t show some of my favorite images from the shoot, because so much of the West decor is Not Safe for Work.

So when I tell couples to find places that have meaning for them, and not just the prettiest possible place, I mean it.

Yes, as I tell couples, any time between 18 months and 18 hours before the wedding can work for engagement shoot, and since Myles, a coach for the Edmonton Oilers, had been spending this past year working up there, we decided to play in the cold-but-not-Siberian-cold environment of New York in February. And we had a wonderful time. If anyone wants tips on how to make sure they can bring out passion in front of a camera, try spending most of the previous year away from your fiancée in a place with cold spells almost eighty degrees below zero.

I’ll have a full write-up of my workshop later today, but here’s a teaser image from it. One of my mantras that I shared with the group is to keep pushing yourself until there is a decent possibility you might fail — if all of your shots are pretty good, you’re not expanding yourself. (Of course, this has to be at times where you are safe to fail on a few frames. The first kiss is probably not the best place for it).

So I let the group watch as I decided to give myself a challenge: I would find the most boring, ugly place around and take photos right there. So I found a featureless office hallway with the ugliest green fluorescent lighting you’ve ever seen. The only thing it had going for it was the natural perspective of a hallway. So I took my awesome couple and sat them down, so that we could see that perspective better, and I lit them with a very warm, tungsten video light. With white balance correction, that turned the ambient from a horrible puke-green to a kind of funky and cool deep turquoise, a nice contrast to her red shirt, and of course this is kind of a funky couple.

When life hands you sunsets like this, you use them.

The first full-day Ryan Brenizer photography workshop starts tomorrow! All full up, but dispatches and more dates to come!

Ok, this one is just cute. Henry and Viviana told me that she used to wait for him at this restaurant every week before the dance class they took together, and he would come up and tap on the window. So we re-enacted it, with a twist.

The hardest thing about doing engagement shoots is to get a shot that the client will love but that I haven’t seen before. Luckily, there are few places for surprises like New York City.

I am not sure if it’s possible to have more fun on an engagement session than we had.

It had to be done

Timoria practices her craft