East Sussex Engagement Shoot with Becky & Danny near their family home at Bewl Water, near Ticehurst. I met Becky & Danny for the first time in person as we initially had their consultation on Zoom during the lockdown. We had a wander down to the nature reserve section of Bewl Water on a summer evening with promising light.

East Sussex Engagement Shoot

We started in a small area of woodland for a couple of warm up shots, having a wander through the woods whilst I captured a few shots of them walking together. The woodland opened up to the Bewl Water reservoir and we got a few shots near the water’s edge as the evening light broke through the clouds to provide some fantastic golden hour lighting.

I wanted to focus on some minimalist style compositions, using just the water or the sky as a backdrop which was a little tricky at first, because of the harsh lighting but I thought we got some great shots using the sky as a background with a soft depth of focus.

Using the tree here as a background and a very soft depth of field, I was able to create some quite dreamy backgrounds with the light shining through the trees. I also used a lot of my landscape photography techniques to get a few shots along the waters edge as well as mixing up the posing slightly four different shots.

Bewl Water Engagement Photoshoot

We walked a little further into some for woodland, and I liked this little spot on a small hill with a fence leading the eye into the background. There’s quite a bit of vignetting in the post production here that works really well to darken the background and highlight the light falling on Becky and Danny.

On our way back, the sun was very low at this point costing some brilliant backlighting against this area with a small fence for the couple to lean against and get these intimate shots. The colour of the lights on the trees in the background really worked for me.

For the final photographs, I decided to experiment with my new flash lighting and get some shots along the waters edge again but to use the flash to ensure that the background was correctly exposed. This allowed me to capture the beautiful clouds in the warm evening light, and capture the deep blues in the sky. You could see more of my experimentation with off-camera flash on these related blog posts.