Proposal with a Romantic Setup at Brainard LakeProposal Details:

The story went that they had some kind of AirBnB experience setup for them.  There was some beverage, snacks, a blanket with pillows setup in a spot to watch the sun set.  The reality was that family set some things up for them and were in waiting.  When she walked up she still did not know what was going on as seen in the hidden video.  It was around the time of their anniversary  so they were doing some special things for one another.  Even when he read what he wrote out about their relationship it still was not tipping her off.  In her own words “I didn’t think you were going to do it.”  This was after what likely felt like to the guy about 30 seconds of her catching her breath.

While all of this is going down true candid photos are being taken of this reaction.  We count these as priceless cause you can never recreate them.  It’s real, raw, and tells the story.  Though it is very challenging to shoot proposals we love them.  What we have seen is the read of the scenario and having the right gear has helped the most.  Most photographers are 3-10 feet away when we see proposals go down and you could never get the nearly 9 minutes of candids at that distance so I guess this is its own thing.

Sometimes when guys see some setup they think ‘I want that’.  We have debated doing those kind of things over the years.  While it may look simple there is a lot to it along with a lot of customizations.  Those are hard to scope and what we find is most explain it as simple but it functioning is multiple man hours work to setup.  The biggest reason is that this kind of reaction is fairly uncommon.  Most women would 100% know something is up and it would change the look of surprise in the photos.

Another angle is that while the ‘Brainard Lake Overlook‘ area is fairly chill there are still forest services rules and regulations.  While you cannot tell in the blog they did push things a bit further than what is likely allowed.  We will not dive into all of those but often when one does some kind of romantic setup they want something that either does not work in Colorado due to light / wind or that is almost always illegal like fire related.

You can get proposal ideas from reading past blogs and read about how we do proposals on our engagement proposals page. If you like what you see here and are considering using this location here are some of the other shoots we have done at Brainard Lake.  Here is the work at the Brainard Lake Overlook area.