Under the Full Moon | A St. Augustine Couples Session

Some sessions you plan. Some sessions plan you.

This one started with an email at eight o’clock at night. I keep business hours for a reason – I learned a long time ago that the work holds up better when I do too – but every so often something lands in your inbox that doesn’t ask permission to wait until morning. Susan’s was one of those. A vision, fully formed, for a session to celebrate a decade of marriage. Ten years. Under a full moon. On the beach.

I read it twice and answered before I could talk myself into being professional about it. By the next day we had a date, a time, and a feeling that this was already happening – that it had, in some quiet way, already been decided. It felt aligned. That’s the only word for it, and I’ve stopped apologizing for using it.

Chasing a moon I’d never shot

Here’s the honest part: I had never photographed a full moon like this. Not the way she was imagining it: April’s Pink Moon, low and enormous on the horizon, the kind of moon that looks close enough to touch.

So I did my homework. I researched the right lens to keep the moon big and present instead of a far-off pinprick. I tracked exactly when it would crest the horizon where we’d be, and where on the coast it would rise closest to the water. A full moon doesn’t wait for you to be ready. You either know your timing or you miss it, and I wasn’t about to miss this one.

We landed on a stretch of sand just south of the Guana Reserve’s middle beach, somewhere between Vilano and Ponte Vedra. It wasn’t the spot we’d first dreamed up – and it turned out to be perfect in every way the original never could have been. Kind of like the universe knew what we needed long before we did.

Daylight, then twilight, then the wait

We started soft, in the last gold of the day. The two of them – Susan and Paul – walking hand in hand down the sand, barefoot, easy with each other in the way only people who’ve chosen each other for ten years can be. No stiffness to coach out of them. Just two people who genuinely like being near each other, which is the whole thing, really. That’s the photograph.

As the light dropped we played in the twilight – that blue, dreamy in-between hour I could shoot forever. And then we did the thing that almost never makes it onto a shot list: we waited. We sat on the beach and let the sky do its work.

Somewhere down the shore a bonfire was going, music drifting over on the wind. And we just talked. About the cosmos. About how we’re all one – how everything, underneath everything, is love. How gratitude sits at the very heart of growth and expansion. We talked about energy, about souls all moving along a single journey, and how somehow the three of us had arrived at almost exactly the same way of holding this strange, enormous gift of being alive. By the time the moon finally broke the horizon, blood-orange and impossibly large before it climbed silver into the dark, it didn’t feel like a client session anymore. It felt like sitting with people I’d known forever.

What stayed

This is the couple that became friends. The kind you don’t see coming and then can’t imagine not having. We’ve hung out since. Collaborated. Taken little trips together – including getting our tarot read, because of course we did. That’s how this one wrote itself.

I think about that 8pm email a lot. About answering it the way I’m “not supposed to.” If I’d waited until morning, I’d still have gotten the booking. But I’m not sure I’d have gotten *this* – the trust that comes from someone feeling, right from the first reply, that they’d found their person for the job.

Dreaming up something out of the ordinary – a full moon, an anniversary, a vision that’s been living in your head? That’s exactly the work I want to be doing. Tell me about it. I’ll probably answer faster than I should.

Explore more about my approach to couples sessions here. Or if you’re ready to get started reach out here.