Josh & Alisa // Engagement Photos at Bushy Run Battlefield in Jeannette, PA

I always blog engagement photos before the wedding, but Josh & Alisa are a “special” case.
If you missed the highlights of their wedding last week, make sure you go back & get “caught up” before continuing on!

I’ll never forget meeting with them at our little Starbucks here in Irwin, PA. It was a rainy & grey Saturday morning. Normally, I don’t specifically take note of what a person drinks, but I remember Alisa ordering a latte & then asking if there was caffeine in it (which led to her asking for a decaf version). I probably wouldn’t even remember that, but what they told me next cemented that fact in my brain.

As we sat together in the cozy coffee shop, they told me how they met at college & how Josh proposed in Florida (with some help from his Grandma). They told me all about what they had in mind for their St. Patrick’s Day wedding in just a few months. I was 100% smitten with them as a couple & how sweet their story was (and I can’t lie: a St. Patrick’s Day wedding for an Irish bride was making my heart all a-flutter)!

And that’s when there was a pause in the conversation and Josh & Alisa smiled at each other. Josh turned back to me and said, “We love everything about you, your photography, and your packages, we just need to talk about the engagement session.” My curiosity piqued, Josh went on: “We just found out some exciting news, so we have a bit of a different idea for our engagement photos.”

They went on to tell me that they’d just found out that Alisa was pregnant. They laughed: thus the decaf latte! They were both super excited to be having a baby just a few months after they would be getting married! Being 5 months pregnant on their wedding day did present a certain conundrum though: since they had been planning this wedding for over a year, Alisa had already bought her dress. It was a gorgeous mermaid style dress, that even though it fit at the moment, would definitely not fit at 5-months pregnant on the wedding day.

Enter Josh & Alisa’s idea: what if we did engagement photos (and soon), in Alisa’s wedding dress? We laughed & called them “engagement photos in wedding attire” or “pre-wedding wedding photos”. Needless to say, I got super excited & said of course we could do that! That would be so much fun!

So, just a few weeks later, on a particularly gorgeous & glowy afternoon (that looks warm but was anything but!), we set out for some “secret” engagement photos! Josh & Alisa hadn’t told their families yet that they were expecting, so we had to keep everything completely under wraps! No sneak peeks, no blog posts – and after you see the photos, you’ll know why it was killing me!! Josh & Alisa’s “pre-wedding” photos turned out to be some of my very favorite images ever, so you can imagine my excitement at finally being able to share some of them today!

Josh still hadn’t seen Alisa’s wedding dress when we got together, so we set up to do a First Look! It was so beautiful & made the moment even more special.

And look at this handsome pup who came along for his human’s photos!!

Poor Baloo was having a tough time being tied to a tree & watching his humans have their photos taken, so while Josh took him back to the car, I took some photos of Alisa by herself – isn’t she the most gorgeous?!

I’m so glad you can’t physically see the temperature! These photos look so (deceivingly) warm, but in reality, it was barely in the 30’s! Poor Alisa was shivering! She & Josh get a huge A++ for being so incredibly brave & sticking it out for me!