Marianne + Joe: San Luis Obispo Engagement Session (Wait! That’s us!!)

Be prepared! This blog post has a lot more words than usual. But don’t fret! In the end there are a lot of photos too. :)

This rest of this blog post is also going to be written by Joe (after a brief introduction)!  Joe is my full time second shooter, business partner, and fiancé! Joe and I started Marianne Wilson Photography together a few years ago. He was an attorney and helped with more of the business end of things. Early this year Joe transitioned out of his legal career and started shooting with me full time! So, when you book me, you are actually getting both Joe and I! Without further adieu, here’s Joe:

For those of you who follow Marianne on Twitter or Facebook, you probably already know that Marianne and I got engaged!!! We thought that it would be a good idea to post the full story on the blog and, since I was the one to plan it, we thought I should be the one to write it! Here is the full story of how the engagement happened:

It all began with a question from Marianne to me: “when are Chris and Marcie going to get engaged? I feel like they have been dating for forever!”

Chris is a friend of mine from high school. Chris had been dating Marcie for the better part of a decade and Marianne was curious about whether he had mentioned any plans for engagement. I responded honestly with “I have no idea.” Little did Marianne know that at the time she asked that question, I was actually trying to figure out a way to propose to her! I wanted the proposal to be really cool/different and be a complete surprise. But that was really difficult because she knows me so well and, I am sure it will shock you all to find out, we don’t regularly go to a whole lot of super crazy romantic places except when we are shooting. So, just getting her to a fun and romantic place by ourselves would probably arouse her suspicions. The second she asked me that question about Chris and Marcie, it put the seed of an idea in my head: I could get Marianne to a really beautiful location to ask her to marry me by tricking her into thinking that she was going on a shoot for someone else!!!

I thought about trying to fake Chris and Marcie’s engagement, but the practicalities were impossible to overcome. I mean, if I told Marianne that Chris and Marcie got engaged but no one was sending them congratulations on facebook or anything, Marianne would know that something was weird. Worse, if I asked them to change their status on facebook and all of her family thought that Chris finally popped the question, that could make for some interesting relationship problems for one of my oldest friends. Nope… that wasn’t happening.

But I didn’t know anyone who was actually engaged at the time. So, that idea was filed away with so many other ideas that I couldn’t figure out how to make into a reality.

Then, two weeks later, I got a momentous message from Marianne: “Hey! Guess what? Chris and Marcie got engaged last weekend!” It was like the stars had aligned and the Universe was like “Joe, you need to go with this.” I am not one to argue with fate. So I went with it.

I decided that I wanted to set up a fake shoot with Chris and Marcie where we would “bump into” another photographer friend of ours, Ken Kienow. We would shoot for a couple of minutes, I would pop the question and Ken would take photos. Then, we would have Ken shoot Marianne and I in the most super-legit engagement session ever! GENIUS!

Problem. Ken lives in San Luis Obispo and Chris, Marcie, Marianne and I all live in Thousand Oaks (about 3 hours South of San Luis Obispo). For us to “bump into” Ken in Thousand Oaks would be a huge red flag.

SOLUTION! We had been encouraging one of our associate photographers up in Santa Ynez (still about 1.5 hours from San Luis Obispo, but getting closer) to set up more engagement shoots up by her for practice and so we could give her feedback. IF I could convince Marianne that we should do the shoot with the associate and that either the associate or Chris and Marcie wanted to do it in San Luis Obispo, then it wouldn’t be weird for us to bump into Ken! Kapow! Solved!

Pretty much everyone I ran that plan by thought that it was so complicated that it was destined to fail. Nonetheless, I went with it because IF I pulled it off, it would be the legendary proposal that Marianne deserved!

I got Ken, Chris, Marcie and the associate all on board. I told Marianne “hey, we should see if Ken will recommend some cool spots to shoot and maybe see if he wants to grab a beer after we are done!” Marianne agreed and I sent Ken an email with Marianne CC’d and had Ken write back a few suggestions and mention that it was a “funny coincidence because he had an engagement shoot that day too, so we would probably bump into one another.” Smoooooooth.

From there, it all pretty much went as planned. I got up in the middle of the night and put the ring in my lens bag underneath my favorite lens (so I knew she wouldn’t just grab the lens from my bag in the morning and see the ring) and I packed up a couple of outfit changes for Marianne and I in a backpack.

We drove up to San Luis Obispo and arrived about 2 hours before we were supposed to start shooting so that we could scout some locations to shoot (as we normally do when shooting in places that we are not familiar with). Chris and Marcie also showed up a little early, so we started shooting with them before our associate got there. Marianne and I “bumped into” Ken right as our associate arrived. Kristy, Marianne and I shot Chris and Marcie and Ken hung out with us while he was “waiting for his client” (he even kept looking toward the parking lot for his non existent clients while he was “waiting,” which I thought was a very nice touch).

The time for Ken’s ‘clients’ to show up came and passed so it was getting down to the wire for me to ask before it was going to start being strange that Ken was still standing there. I had been hoping Marianne would ask me to grab her a lens from my bag like she normally does (which would give me an excuse to get on my knee and reach into the bag for the ring without arousing suspicion) but since she was shooting film and kind of hanging back, she just wasn’t asking. I knew I had to push a little.

Joe: Do you need any lenses?

Marianne: Nope, I am just gonna hang back and maybe shoot some film.

Joe: Oh! Well, if you are shooting from further back, do you think you’ll want the 135mm then?

Marianne: ::slightly annoyed by me trying to push the lens on her:: No, I’m ok. Thanks

Joe: ::equally annoyed by her not wanting a lens like she normally would and needing to think on my feet:: Well, what lens do you have on your camera?

Marianne: The 50mm

Joe: Oh! I was wondering where that went. Can I use it for a bit??

Marianne: Uh, yeah… sure

Joe: What lens do you want? ::praying Marianne asks for any lens other than the one on my camera::

Marianne: The 35mm

Joe: ::gets down on one knee and puts his hand in bag:: I have a better idea…

Marianne: ::gets ready to slap me if I try to push the 135 on her again:: Oh?

Joe: ::pulls out ring:: Let’s make this our engagement session.

I then mumbled out about 1/10th of the speech I prepared before I realized that I was about to lose it and should probably just ask “will you marry me?” She said “of course!” We hugged, kissed, and then Ken said “YOU’RE MY COUPLE!” and we had a great time shooting around San Luis Obispo. Here are a few of our favorites from our session with Ken Kienow:

P.S. For all of you grooms out there, don’t get discouraged and just do your best to roll with the punches when the plan isn’t going as well as you would like. You can anticipate tons of spots where problems will pop up, and I promise you, there will be more problems than you can anticipate. Just don’t give up and do your best to stick to the plan! There were definitely a few moments where I was pretty sure that the plan was going to fall apart. For example:

When I initially convinced Marianne to do the shoot in San Luis Obispo, we were planning on driving up to San Francisco (for another shoot) and doing the associate shoot on the way. As it turned out, Chris and Marcie were not available on the day we were going to be driving up to San Francisco, so we had to schedule it 3 days earlier. (meaning we were going to drive half way to San Francisco, back to Thousand Oaks, and then back up to San Francisco again all in the same week). I remember Marianne looking at me a couple of times asking “so if this shoot is for our associate to get experience, why are we driving three hours up to San Luis Obispo and back again?” I mumbled something about San Luis Obispo being a fun college town that I would like to hang out in, wanting to be 100% sure that Chris and Marcie got some great photos, us being an insurance policy and being able to give on the spot feedback to the associate, etc. She begrudgingly bought it.

Also, when Chris and Marcie showed up early, Marianne decided that she wanted to shoot film and as we walked toward the first location she told me that she wanted me to lead shoot. Normally, not a big deal at all for me to lead shoot. But I was so nervous, my stomach was in knots, and it had not even crossed my mind that I would actually be shooting that day! I was like “uh… go out in the grass… uh… hug… uhhhh… There’s some weird light going on in that spot, lets go up here” and basically just bought time until our associate showed up.