Jake is a quiet, strong baseball player for a college team down in Texas who absolutely adores his sweetheart, Ashley! Ashley is full of radiant smiles and affection for her fiancé. They are too cute to watch!

Their wedding is coming this December and while the wedding plans are well under way, we took a couple nights during the hottest days of this summer to meet up and get some great engagement photos in the Lee’s Summit area (Downtown Lee’s Summit and the new Bass Pro)

I hope you enjoy some of the photos I was able to put together here. There are always so many to choose from that it is hard to narrow down for the blog. I hope you like my favs!

I met Ashtan (and her big sister, Amanda) a long time ago at a Fashion House shoot in Kansas City. She had never modeled and it was a lot of fun to hang out and get some great photos back then.

Surprise, surprise! Ashtan calls me up not too long ago, asking if I remembered her, to which I replied, “Of course I remember you! Big blue eyes and a sister, right?” She had looked me up and was wanting an engagement session for her and her ruggedly handsome, soon-to-be hubby, Jared. This I can do!

Well, Jared and Ashtan are going away to get married [undisclosed location, but involves a beach, but not me ] and so they wanted a killer engagement session. They dated a lot down by the Crown Center area, so I suggested maybe we could shoot at Liberty Memorial. Liberty Memorial is one of the only WWI memorials in the country. They have an amazing museum and the area is really quite amazing, set up on a hill.

They met me down there and we got to know each other pretty well. Ashtan’s mom even came down and hung out with us for a while! Yah!

I hope you love the photos and I can’t wait to see you guys in wedded bliss!

This session is really, really, really special to me. Really. Do you want to know why? Really? Cool, I’ll tell you why…

Josh is my cousin. In a lot of families, cousins are distant relatives that live in a galaxy far, far away. This is not true with most of my humongous extended family. I was a few years older than Josh, but when we would hang out as kids nearly every week, we were the only boys around the same age, so we played together while all the girls (my sisters) hung out in his two sister’s rooms.

We played with tons of toys like he-man, batman, star wars, g.i. joe’s, micro machines and matchbox cars. We collected baseball cards and garbage pail kids. We ran around outside with capes and hit each other with toys swords, making cool sound effects all the while. Josh and I shot at each other with toy guns and played kickball, and fort, and cops/robbers, and james bond, and wiffle ball and basketball. I even tried to play soccer with Josh, but he was always faster and better than me, because he actually played in a competitive league. We grew up together and I feel more like siblings than cousins.

Josh grew up (so did I, kind of…) and we did grow apart due to life and circumstance, but Josh has grown into an awesome man of God that has a confident, fun-loving personality that has an enormous positive effect on every person he meets. One of the most amazing persons he has met is Beth. Beth is kind and sweet and has a kindred funny spirit…not to mention she is gorgeous! Way to go, Josh!

They have been engaged for a while now and are getting married in a few short weeks. I look forward to being a part of their day and capturing every moment.

We hung out down in Westport, MO for their engagement session, grabbing some coffee at Broadway Cafe and walking around enjoying the beautiful weather. I hope you all enjoy the photos…and sorry for blabbing on and on.

Much love to you all,

-dustin

Oh…and as a sidenote, I shot this with a Nikon D300 (which I rented from borrowlenses.com) and my 24mm f/2.8.