The cover story idea was all by the groom-to-be, Jason.
He brought it to me when we first chat about his overall plan of the proposal. Two scuba divers would surface at the Casino Point dive park with a mesh bag of shells and walk past him and Crystal as though by chance. He would ask whether they’d found anything interesting down there. They would offer to let the two of them pick through the bag. One shell would be set with small stones and shut too tight to open, and he would take it from her to help.
“It’s just an idea I thought of,” he said on our first call, which undersells it considerably.
For most of the summer the plan was Laguna Beach. Then the tropical storms came through, one after another, and the surf ran so high the news was reporting the sand had washed off the beach entirely.
Trina, one of the divers, mentioned she had been going out to Catalina, where the water sits protected on the Avalon side. So he moved all of it. The divers, the bag of shells, the question. While all that sounded like a great plan, he had never set foot on the island in his life.
When you haven't stood there yet
I had not photographed at this particular corner of Avalon before, and I said so on the first call, because it changed what I could promise him.
Not having stood somewhere is a real limitation, and worth saying out loud. A photograph of a place will not tell you where the sun actually falls at five o’clock, or that a slope behind a building pulls the shade forward a good hour earlier than the sunset time suggests, or which way the foot traffic moves on a Saturday afternoon. Those are the things that decide whether a frame works.
What has changed is how much of that you can answer before you ever arrive. Satellite view, street-level imagery, other people’s photographs taken from the same angles, the sun’s position for that exact date — between them you can build something close enough to be useful, and you can build it together, while the person proposing is still deciding.
So we looked at the dive park together on Google Earth — me at my desk, him parked in a car in Anaheim on his way to meet the divers for the first time. He had already done his homework. He had worked out that the dive park is where every diver on the island gets in and out of the water, with a small lot beside it, and he wondered aloud whether that was really the place for it.
It wasn’t, quite. What I added was the railing: kneel at a railing and hold a ring up, and the rail runs through the frame at roughly the height of your hand.
He wasn’t troubled by it. “I’m not picky about the background,” he said. “The big thing for me is just capturing the moment and capturing the surprise.”
Which is the right answer, and not the one I always get. The thing I end up saying to nearly every couple is that the most picturesque spot and the most practical spot are rarely the same spot. Someone has to walk into that scene carrying a bag. Choose for the moment. Portraits can move.
And then you go and stand in it, because a plan built on a screen is a starting point and nothing more.
Most of the weddings I photograph are at venues I have not worked before. That is ordinary. A photographer who has already shot every venue a couple might choose is a photographer who only works in a handful of places. What makes it safe is not familiarity — it is arriving early enough to be wrong about something and still have time to change it. A few hours ahead, or the day before, on foot, in the real light, with the camera in hand.
So I took an earlier ferry, landed at three, and had two hours on the ground before anyone else arrived — long enough to walk the whole stretch, check what we had drawn on a screen against the actual place, and keep a second and third option in mind.
What concealment actually looks like
A camera on a tripod with its legs spread open is the most obvious tell there is. It announces that something is about to happen. So the camera stayed on a collapsed tripod in my hand for the whole walk up the promenade, and Bryan and I walked alongside the divers as though we were filming them — which, for several minutes, we were.
Then the bag came out across the stonewall, and we pulled back about fifteen feet, and everything we had arranged begin to unfold on its own organically.
The takeaway
The most inventive proposals I photograph are almost never my idea. They come from the person doing the asking — someone who has been turning it over for months.
My work isn’t to improve on the cover story, but to protect originality of it all and provide recommendations and what to look out for, the small details. To hold the thing he imagined steady enough that it can actually happen, and then to get out of the way in time for the part he could never have scripted.
Planning your own proposal on Catalina? I’ve put everything I’ve learned from photographing on the island into one place: our guide to Catalina Island proposal and wedding locations.
Planning your own proposal?
If you have an original cover story in mind and would like to plan with precise execution and delivery, let’s hear it! Original stories are the best and most authentic way to go.
