This engagement session is so close to my heart. Cammi and I have been good friends since the beginning of high school. While most people nowadays know her by her first name, Danyelle, I will always call her my Cammikins. I’ve known her through our losing streak on C-team soccer, many a verb conjugation in Spanish class, and sharing an English class with our favorite teacher. We’ve kept up over long distance through college, and through many heartbreaks, and now to see her meet Tim and find in him her perfect match has been such a privilege.

They met, of all places, on Tinder. While they kept their relationship casual for a while, before long Cammi realized that this Tim guy was unlike any other guy she’d ever dated, in all the best ways. And once she came around, they got serious quickly. So to all you online-dating skeptics out there—trust this wedding photographer here, it CAN work!

This is one wedding I will not be photographing, because I am going to be fully present for my best friend as one of her bridesmaids. However I absolutely had to capture their engagement pictures. We met up in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains, at the Elena Gallegos Picnic Ground of Albuquerque, New Mexico. They dressed in complementary yellows and blues, their wedding colors. Cammi’s yellow skirt so perfectly matched the blooming cholla and cactus flowers of the desert you would have thought we manipulated it that way. As the sun set below the horizon, the sky lit up in streaks of pink and the mountains really showed off.

This session is one of my favorites of 2017 not only because it involved people I know and love dearly, but also because it so perfectly embodies so much of what I love about my home in the high desert of New Mexico.