{Ryan + Samantha | Engagement Session | Birch Aquarium of Scripps College in San Diego | January 2012} Oh. My. Peachfuzz. There is joy. And there is love. And then there is smashing hot wonderfulness that I got to shoot last month. :) Ryan + Sam are on a whirlwind engagement escapade. I literally choked on my mac 'n cheese (yes, i still eat mac n cheese) when i heard she was planning her spankin suave wedding in 4 months. Yup. I just inhaled involuntarily thinking about it. We scheduled their San Diego engagement session for mid-January and shook a few fists when we found out the forecast was going to be grey, dreary and wet. Alas, myself and my wonderful award-winning travel buddy Alyssa, pushed forward. I had hope that something amazing would come of it all. We scratched Plan A and Plan B for locations when we realized both places would be miserable in the rain. Then our awesome San Diego weekend host, Rebecca Brown, took us to the Birch Aquarium property and I squealed. Rain or shine, the foresty backdrop and mid-summer-esque arena was perfect. | lkmR+S brought this perfect picnic set up topped off with a pitcher full of Twizzlers. I mean, say that to yourself for a moment. It's cute. Right? I think they should get each other a pitcher full of Twizzlers every valentines day. Just sayin'.We started our afternoon off on the picnic blanket and they were so giddy about everything. fun little details mind you, Sam has no clue what ryan was doing in the background. what a ham.some golden favorites :)they just so happened to have an umbrella. and then the wedding colors got whipped out. apparently Sam was particularly excited about my challenge to find a wardrobe that brought in wedding colors into the mix. That way the pictures posted on wedding day would tie in with the color scheme. Teal & Yellow baby...Sam hollered right before wrapping up in the forest, "oh! we forgot the socks!" gosh. forget the socks? that would have been terrible! So we snagged a few shots of their socks. we were racing the sun by the time we finished up part one of the afternoon. We still had this cool wood backrop to nail and then of course the sunset on the beach. I wish we had taken a video of these last few pictures in the tree...Pretty much veered off the road, illegally parked, had alyssa keep the car humming while we pranced (i'm sure Ryan appreciates that verb) to this cool tree with gold leaves and got them real cozy with each other. We were laughing pretty hard. At least Sam and I were. Ryan was cool about it all and just dove into every opportunity he had to embrace his bride-to-be. What a keeper! :) And that's only part one. :)