Montaña de Oro Engagement Photographer

Featuring Ahtziry and Justin

If you’ve never been to Montaña de Oro State Park, let me paint the picture. There is a eucalyptus forest that opens without warning onto coastal dunes covered in ice plants and succulents, which spill down onto a wide, quiet beach. Morro Rock is sitting on the horizon like a sentinel. It’s one of the most varied and beautiful stretches of the California coast. For an engagement session, it’s almost unfair how many different looks you can get in a single afternoon.

Ahtziry and Justin were the perfect couple to bring there. Easy with each other, genuinely happy, and completely unbothered by a camera pointed at them. They just moved through the place like they’d been coming here for years.

Montaña de Oro Engagement Photographer

We started in the trees. Montaña de Oro’s eucalyptus grove has this cathedral quality to it and Ahtziry and Justin looked completely at home in it. Foreheads together in front of a big trunk, laughing down a winding path, tucked against a fallen log with the light filtering through the canopy above them. Ahtziry kept holding in a smile while looking at Justin, which is the kind of thing you can’t direct and can only hope to catch.

There’s a frame of Justin looking straight into the camera. He was wearing a black t-shirt, grey chinos, and white sneakers. Ahtziry was holding his hand just out of frame. And a wide shot of the two of them mid-laugh walking through the forest that I keep coming back to because it’s just genuinely joyful.

Down to the Dunes

When the forest opens onto the dunes, the whole mood shifts. Suddenly you’re in this bright, open, coastal California scene — ice plants and sagebrush, sandy slopes, the ocean appearing below. We worked our way down through it. Ahtziry was in her dress moving easily through the terrain. Justin was holding her from behind on the slope with the dunes rolling out behind them.

There’s a shot of the two of them standing together on the dunes, the ice-plant-covered hillside framing them perfectly. It feels like a California postcard. And another of them walking the narrow path through the plants toward the water, hand in hand, that has real movement to it.

On The Beach

Ahtziry took her shoes off at some point. She carried them behind Justin’s back while she hugged him. They just stayed barefoot for the rest of the session, which was the right call. The beach at Montaña de Oro is wide and unhurried, the kind of place where you forget there’s anywhere else to be.

We walked the shoreline with Morro Rock in the distance. They sat together on the flat sandstone formations jutting out from the sand and just looked out at the water. Ahtziry looked back over her shoulder at Justin. It was a moment that became one of the best black and white frames of the day. She grabbed the back of his head to pull him in for a kiss on the beach, and he smiled into it like he saw it coming and didn’t mind at all.

The hero shot — Justin holding Ahtziry from behind, a surfer in the background riding a wave, the whole Pacific spread out behind them — is everything this location promises and then some. It was an epic Montaña de Oro engagement session.