If you’re looking for a place to have your engagement photos taken in the St. Pete, FL area, I think I found the perfect spot. I was worried walking around St. Pete Beach because the sand is covered in umbrellas and cabanas (I think literally every single hotel on the water has at least 100).
My bride-to-be had a great idea of bringing her beach cruiser and a basket of baby’s breath and we knew it’d make for great pictures, but didn’t know where they could “ride” it….
I was staying at the Bellwether Beach Resort, and noticed that there was a dead-end street right next to it with a beach entrance ramp. The street (52nd & Gulf Blvd) connects to the Bellwether’s parking garage and the end of the street has a ramp that takes you directly to the beach where you could enter their beach bar (Bongo’s). There is a perfect patch of beach where there are ZERO cabanas, truly a St. Pete Beach miracle.
There are people around, naturally, but there’s just enough space that we honestly felt like we had a ton of room to do our thing. People were very respectful and stayed out of our way. The ramp wasn’t being used constantly like nearly every other public beach ramp that I found when I was location scouting.
We took about 50x more photos once we were actually on the beach. You can see from these photos how easy to was to seclude my subjects to make it feel like their engagement shoot was their own little movie. The sunset this day was really showing off for them, and we loved it.
My absolute favorite part of this whole session was once we were able to take advantage of blue hour. Personally, for my taste, blue hour is the most beautiful time to get outdoor portraits, and this day was no different. I love the moody, dramatic tones that blue hour casts. If you have an engagement shoot coming up, do not overlook this part of the sunset. So many people end their sunset sessions prematurely, just when the lighting gets (in my opinion) really good!
& then right as we were packing up to leave, we looked over and saw the moon. It was SO beautiful and the perfect way to end this perfect engagement session. Congrats to the happy couple. <3
If you’re looking for a photographer for your beach wedding, elopement, or engagement session, get in touch today! I live for all the beach shoots. The ocean? The Great Lakes? Your parents’ pond? I gotchu!
