Lake Norman Rainy Proposal

This proposal story has some unexpected twists in it and the fact that this day almost did not happen at all is just crazy to me. Although for a while it did look like we were going to have to cancel, in the end it worked out perfectly. In fact better than I could have planned.

Bella reached out to me about doing a session in Charlotte for her and her long distance boyfriend, Dennis, while she came to visit him. They met while vacationing in New York. She lives in Illinois while he lives in South Carolina. Shortly after they had officially booked me, Dennis reached out to me on Instagram telling me he wanted to use the session to propose. While Bella and I planned the session and talked about locations, Dennis and I were also planning. Bella really wanted to have some rooftop shots as well as shots at the water like she had seen in one of my TickTock’s. We decided to start in Uptown Charlotte and then head to Lake Norman. My only concern for the day was their session was scheduled for the 4th of July weekend and short of having private lake access pretty much anywhere on the lake was going to be packed. However, before we got to that point another wrench got thrown into the plan. The week of their session Dennis emailed me telling me they were going to have to cancel. Do you remember last summer (2023) when all those flights got cancelled and people were stuck in airports for days?! Well Bella was flying back from Mexico and was caught in the Denver airport. By the time he had emailed she had been stranded in the airport for two days and she still needed to somehow get a flight to Chicago so that she could catch her flight to Charlotte. If I had been in town we could have just pushed their session back to when she managed to make it but I was unfortunately leaving right after their session to be gone for a week shooting out of state. We decided not to cancel and just play it by ear. She managed to get a flight back to Chicago and somehow manage to make it all the way to Charlotte with no time to spare. We started on top of a parking lot in Uptown, it was a beautiful (Extremely hot) sunny day. As we headed to the Lake Norman area the sky began to grow dark and when we arrived at our second location there may or may not have been some thunder. We decided to just go for it. They fully embraced the rain. We started at a more secluded part of the beach. The beach was packed (my original concern) when we first arrived but as the rain fall became heavier, the beach cleared out. We shortly had the beach all to ourselves and when Dennis was ready to pop the question he signaled me. I told them to face away from each other and on the count of three I wanted them to turn towards each other. As Bella was following my direction, Dennis was pulling out the ring and dropping to one knee. As he Proposed the rain began to clear and we had a few more minutes with the beach all to ourselves to capture some ring shots before the people began to come back out.