From Torreón Fields to Todos Santos: One Way of Seeing

These photographs come from two sessions, two thousand kilometers apart. One in the alfalfa fields and abandoned railway lines outside Torreón, in northern Mexico. The other in the streets, doorways, and beaches of Todos Santos, Baja California Sur. Put them side by side and you'll notice what I want to talk about: the backdrop is doing far less work than people think.

Couples ask me about locations constantly, and I understand why. A destination feels like insurance — if the place is beautiful, the photos will be. But the place has never once been the reason a photograph mattered to the people in it. What mattered was what they were doing when the shutter opened. Walking. Laughing at something the other one said. Not noticing me.

This engagement session happened twenty minutes from where I grew up doing business — a stretch of disused track, an alfalfa field, one enormous tree. Nothing on a location scout's wish list. We simply walked, and I stayed slightly behind or slightly ahead, the way I would at a wedding.

The photograph above is the one a conventional shot list would have deleted: he's in motion, blurred, half out of the story. I kept it because that blur is the story — one person grounded, the other still arriving. You cannot pose that. You can only be present when it happens.

Between the walking, there's always a pause — and the pause is where each person shows you who they are separately. Her stillness. His half-smile behind the sunglasses. An engagement session is also two individual portraits waiting to be noticed.

Todos Santos gives you everything Torreón doesn't: ochre walls, deep colonial shadow, the Pacific ending every street. The photograph at the top of this page — two people joined by one hand under the arches of the Hotel California — is what that town hands you at noon: light most photographers run from. I don't. Hard light draws hard shapes, and if you place people honestly inside those shapes, the sun does the composition for you.

Indoors, the town keeps its character. Green walls, old wood, a painted Frida watching over a lobby that hasn't changed in decades. I didn't move a single lamp. When a room already has an opinion, your job is to listen to it.

By the time we reached the beach, the couple had forgotten the camera entirely — which is the entire objective, and usually takes about forty minutes regardless of the country. She climbed on his shoulders because she wanted to, not because I suggested it. The wave broke on cue because the Pacific is generous like that.

So here is my honest answer to the location question: choose a place that means something to you, or a place you've always wanted to stand in — Todos Santos, San Miguel de Allende, a field outside your hometown. Any of them work. What travels from session to session isn't the backdrop. It's the way of seeing: no scripts, no templates, just the truth of two people on an ordinary afternoon that happens to be theirs.