I love taking advantage of the endless opportunities to meet people on social media. Theres a good chance that if we’ve met, its because of instagram; heck you’re probably here because of it! And surprise, this is no different! Renaya and I originally talked about grabbing coffee and meeting up, until I so desperately wanted to be behind the camera again (it had been a couple of weeks), and asked if I could photographer her and her boyfriend!

So we met up a few days later at a local trailhead! Renaya and Ben are some of the cutest and most in love couple I’ve ever photographed. In photography you kind of have a list of poses and prompts you can give to the people you’re photographing to help them feel more comfortable and to get more natural reactions. These two didn’t need a word from me, you can truly tell how in love they are just by their interactions with each other, even when I wasn’t shooting.

Grand Junction Locations

I’ve been driving around this town for two months now seeing all of these amazing locations that I want to shoot in. Grand Junction I’m finding has just about every landscape you can image within a short radius. I think wikipedia explains it best by saying we have Colorado National Monument to the south with its canyons and mesas’ interwinding into the Black Ridge Canyon Wilderness and Mcinnis Caynon National Conservation Area. We have Grand Mesa to the east, the largest flat top mountain in the world, and I’m hoping a welcome reprieve from the heat in the summer (although it is currently covered in 16 feet of snow!). There are the Book Cliffs to the north, a series of more mesas that extend into Utah, and then there’s I-70, the freeway that runs right through it all and keeps this small city easily commutable.

We are surrounded by BLM land, which, hi, hello, have you met me? I know I will never tire of exploring the nooks and crannies of our federal lands.

Funny enough, the first location Renaya, Ben and I shot at is just below a mesa of huge houses but I love how undeveloped it feels and how quirky the landscape is. The colors and texture reminds reminds me so much of the paint mines near Colorado Springs!