Looking through these photos and remembering meeting up with Sam and Dustin in Seattle this past October basically makes my heart want to burst with warm, mushy feelings.

If I’m being honest though — the start to the shoot was actually pretty far from perfect. It would be easy to blog these photos and pretend like this day went off without a hitch but the fact of the matter is that sometimes it helps to remember that plans can go out the window and that winging it sometimes ends up better than the original plan and that clients who are okay with all of these things are the bees knees.

I had photographed a wedding in Dallas the day before, got home around midnight and left the house by 6 a.m. to catch my flight to Seattle the day of Sam and Dustin’s engagement shoot. By 11 a.m. I had landed, picked up a coffee and got in my rental car to scout the areas Sam and I had been e-mailing excitedly back and forth about for months — e-mails from Sam are always golden and hilarious and my absolute favorite — which would leave me about four hours to hit all the locations before meeting up with Sam and Dustin to get started. That early afternoon exploring Seattle was absolutely glorious. I spent so much time hiking around the jaw-droppingly gorgeous Discovery Park looking for the perfect spots for our shoot that before I realized it, 2.5 hours of my scouting time had been used up (over-zealous much, Jillian?). This was going to make it tight to scout as thoroughly as I had planned to peruse the other two sites, but it wasn’t going to be impossible. That’s where the not-so-perfect part of the day started. On my way to the second location my GPS decided to take me in a 6-mile loop off course that I was dumb enough to drive twice before I stopped and GAVE THAT GPS A PIECE OF MY MIND. I make it to Volunteer Park and the place is so jam-packed that there isn’t a parking space in sight. I give it as much time as I can possibly allow hoping for a spot to open up before I decide, ain’t no thing, I’ll just scout from my car, thank you very much! Afterwards I have just enough time to make it over to Capitol Hill to explore a bit before heading over to Sam and Dustin’s place when I realize that I won’t have any extra time to stop and pick up lunch before we start. This might not be as big a deal for some people but 1) I’m not a meal-skipper 2) I had basically hiked like 4+ miles that day and hadn’t eaten since before my 8 a.m. flight and 3) I’m just not a meal-skipper. In my predicament, I decide Sam would totally be cool with me asking to commandeer some pb & j from her kitchen so I text to see if I was correct in this assumption. Fresh out of peanut butter, she tells me she just put a pot of water on the stove to make me some macaroni and cheese and that it will be ready for me when I arrive. Now that is love, my friends. I pull up to their neighborhood right in the nick of time, get overly excited about meeting Sam and Dustin in the flesh for the first time (up until the point I had flown across the country and shown up at their front door we had only skyped/e-mailed), inhaled my mac and cheese that Sam had so graciously prepared for me, and then hit the road to get this shoot started! See, far from perfect?

But I would do it all over again in a heartbeat to spend as wonderful an afternoon with Sam and Dustin in their new city, wingin’ it.

After an outfit change (and can we just pause and take a second to marvel at how wonderful Sam and Dustin’s outfit choices were?) we decided to skip Volunteer Park altogether because helllloooooooooo Discovery Park is miles and miles of magical wonderland, which I would know because I had accidentally spent almost three hours there that morning. But the light when we arrived that evening was even better than I could have possibly imagined. I like to think such beautiful sunshine was a gift for Sam and Dustin for feeding me lunch.

Sam and Dustin, getting to photograph a couple as great and lovely and fun as you two in a place like this is basically what my photographer dreams are made of. I will always treasure this day, your graciousness, and getting to document this sweet season of your life. Reuniting for your wedding day this summer has got me all kinds of excited and I promise to make absolutely certain that I eat lunch before I arrive.