I first met Angel & Jason (a.k.a. The Fretz) at Hilary & Brian’s wedding in Athens, GA last year. With Angel, it goes back quite a bit farther. As it turns out, her mother and I worked at the same company back when she was in her early teens (maybe younger) and we probably met at least once back then… but fast forward all these years and you realize how small the world is sometimes.

They wanted to do their engagement session where they first met. So off we went to the dive bar of dive bars, the 5 Paces Bar which is a block from the St Regis right in the heart of Buckhead. They let us have the run of the entire bar since they weren’t open just yet. We had this idea to pull off their take on the Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the World and this is what we came up with. As you know, the Most Interesting Groom in the World can’t have just one Angel, he has to have two. I posted this sneak peak photo a few weeks ago (I’ll probably make another blog post about exactly how we did this shot):

If there’s one thing I try to do, it’s capture images that look natural and compelling as if you just stumbled into a moment. To do that, as a photographer, you have to work with or against the lighting available to you, and in some cases create the scene entirely on your own. This was all three! Now shooting in a dark bar has it’s own set of challenges, but when you have afternoon sun streaming in both entrances it’s even harder to make it look like a dimly lit bar.

This is the spot, right in between the back door and the bathrooms where they met for the first time…

So here we go… enjoy a few more images!