Here’s something I tell couples that sounds wrong until they see it. You want weather. Not sitting on top of you, but nearby. A system moving through in the morning, or one rolling in later that night, is what builds the clouds. And clouds are what make a sunset worth photographing. A flat blue sky gives you nothing overhead.
Sunday gave us exactly that. It rained all morning, cleared around noon, and by six o’clock the sky over Asbury Park was doing things nobody can plan for.
Nick called me from Manchester, just outside Toms River. Christina knew a proposal was coming at some point, the way most brides do. She had no idea it was that night, on those rocks, with me way up the beach holding a long lens.
Why Asbury and Not Spring Lake
When Nick booked, we went back and forth between Spring Lake and Asbury Park. Spring Lake is beautiful and it’s quieter, and plenty of couples pick it for exactly that. I pushed Asbury because the sunset shows up better there. If you’re going to stand on a beach at golden hour, you want to see the thing you came for.
I got there early, the way I always do, and picked whichever of the jetty and the open beach north of Convention Hall was emptier when they walked up. The rocks won.
Then She Left the Ground
I don’t get many jumpers. Most people put their hands over their mouth. Some cry. Some go completely still and quiet and you can see them doing the math. Christina jumped. Both feet off the rocks, while Nick was still down on one knee holding the ring.
The photographs below run in order. She’s fully airborne in two of them.
That’s the part you can’t direct. I can pick the spot, turn them out of the wind, and tell Nick which way to face. What she does next is all hers.
The Sky Kept Getting Better
This is what the morning rain bought us. Every few minutes the light changed again, so we kept moving. Down to the waterline, into the surf, back up the sand. They weren’t standing around waiting to be posed. They were messing with each other the whole time, which is the easiest kind of session to photograph.
Murals, the Boardwalk, and the Wonder Bar
Nick told me Christina would be down for anything, and that she loves the dive bars around there. That’s most of what I need to build a route.
So we walked the boardwalk and used the murals, which are some of the best free backdrops on the Jersey Shore and change often enough that no two years look the same. They were jumping around and high-fiving each other between frames.
We shot a little outside Convention Hall on the south side, where the arcade windows throw a completely different kind of light than the beach does.
Then we walked over to the Wonder Bar, and obviously we had to do muscle poses out front. That’s who they are. I wasn’t going to be the one to talk them out of it.
A Note on Weather, Since Everybody Asks
Almost every couple who books me watches the forecast all week and panics at the first raincloud. I get it. I still think it’s backwards. The days that scare people are usually the ones that produce the photographs they end up printing. A morning of rain that clears, or a system arriving after dinner, leaves you with a sky full of texture right when you’re standing on the sand.
What I actually worry about is wind, not rain. Wind puts hair across a face during the one reaction nobody gets to redo. Rain we can work with, and some of my favorite proposals happened in it.
Asbury Park in particular rewards the gamble. The boardwalk gives you cover, the murals don’t care about clouds, and the beach north of Convention Hall stays open and usable when the light turns strange. If you want another one, here’s another Asbury Park proposal from the same week, on a jetty at the other end of town.
More proposal stories: Kieran and Daniela on the Asbury Park jetty, and Anthony and Juliette at the Manasquan Inlet.
Ready to Start Planning?
Tell me the date and roughly where you’re thinking, and I’ll help you pick the spot and get the timing right around sunset. If the forecast looks ugly, call me anyway. That’s usually the good news. Fill out my proposal inquiry form here and let’s get started.