Lukas and Marianna wanted their engagement photos somewhere that meant something to them, which is how we ended up in Daintree National Park in Far North Queensland, about two and a half thousand kilometres from where we usually work.

The Daintree is one of the few places on earth where rainforest runs straight into the reef. You can stand on sand with the ocean in front of you and 180 million year old forest directly behind. For a couple of hours of photographs, that's a lot of different worlds within walking distance of each other.

Lukas and Marianna running hand in hand along the sand, rainforest mountains behind them

Starting on the sand

We began at Cape Tribulation in the morning, while the light was still coming in low across the water and the beach was effectively empty. No direction, no posing: we just asked them to walk, and then to keep walking, and photographed what happened in between.

That's usually where engagement shoots turn the corner. The first ten minutes are always a bit stiff, because having a camera pointed at you is strange for most people. Then they forget, and start talking to each other instead of to me, and the photographs stop looking like photographs.

Marianna laughing in Lukas's arms on the beach

Why we shoot engagements at all

Engagement sessions get dismissed as an upsell, and sometimes they are. Done properly they do something genuinely useful: they're a rehearsal for the wedding day.

By the end of a couple of hours together, a couple knows how we work, and we know how they are with each other. Who laughs first. Who goes quiet when a camera appears. Where the hands go. On the wedding day that's two hours of awkwardness you've already spent, and it means we're not strangers when the nerves are highest.

The couple silhouetted on the beach, framed by the dark rainforest canopy

Into the forest

After the beach we went inland. The rainforest is a completely different problem to solve. It's dark under the canopy, the light arrives in hard patches where it breaks through, and the greens are so saturated they can throw colour onto skin.

It's also spectacular. The buttress roots on the strangler figs are taller than people, and once you put a couple next to them the scale does the work without any help from us.

The couple sitting among the huge buttress roots of a strangler fig
Walking a narrow boardwalk path through dense Daintree rainforest

Back out for the last of the light

We finished where we started, on the sand, as the day went soft. The leaning palms along that stretch of coast make natural frames, and by then Lukas and Marianna had long stopped thinking about the camera.

The last frame of the day is the two of them dancing in silhouette, which nobody planned and nobody asked for. They just started, and we were already standing in the right place.

Walking together beneath leaning coconut palms along the shoreline
The couple dancing in silhouette under palms, late in the day

Shooting away from home

We're based in the Illawarra and most of our work is between Wollongong and Ulladulla. But we travel, and days like this one are the reason.

A location you've never worked in forces you to look properly. There's no knowing which lookout catches the light at five o'clock, so you walk it, watch where the sun is going, and work it out in front of you. That's uncomfortable, and it tends to produce better photographs than somewhere you could shoot with your eyes shut.

If you're planning something away from home, whether that's Far North Queensland, interstate or overseas, tell us where and when. We shoot destination weddings and engagements on request.