To say I was excited to take my best friend Tiffany’s maternity photos is an understatement. In fact, I was so excited we did two sets of photos. One gorgeous in-studio shoot you can see here, and another at the Sand Dunes. My mom loved the studio shots so much that she didn’t understand why we were taking a trip out to the Sand Dunes for more photos. But Tiffany and I had been talking about doing this trip for months, if not years. I think I brought up the idea of doing them at the Sand Dunes before she was even pregnant. I had this vision of these incredibly dramatic photos for a while and that vision totally came to life on this shoot. I mean, look at these!

Then, to make it even more special, we were blessed with this GORGEOUS sunset. I don’t think it could have been any more stunning. I mean WOW. We had already left the Sand Dunes when the sky started turning these colors, so we pulled over into a parking lot just to get a look and it was so beautiful we ended up taking these pictures.

It was so hard narrowing down photos to the 60 I went with. The scenery makes it so easy to nail shot after shot. Plus, it helps to have such a beautiful mama with a gorgeous smile!

Adam and Fernando were busy the whole time fluffing Tiffany’s dress so it would perfectly catch the win and create those beautiful shapes. I brought two camera bodies with me. Because of the dust in the air, you don’t want to remove the lens from the body, or it could get your sensor dirty. This, in turn, causes you to be limited in switching lenses. I generally switch lenses at least 2 or 3 times during a shoot. To solve this problem, I brought my very expensive camera setup and my little $500 camera setup that I plan to use for traveling. I got amazing pictures from each of these. I’m planning to do a post that shows off the differences in the cameras and what you get for your money. It was a great experience shooting these cameras side by side and it was another awesome learning experience.

Here are a few pictures I caught of just the scenery. That first shot is a picture from our hotel room! We stayed at the Great Sand Dunes Lodge and for being a little hotel in the middle of no where, it was quite nice! I would definitely stay there, and even take an extended trip so we could explore the Sand Dunes and surrounding towns even more.

We only stayed for one night this time and we did make an effort to get over to the Sand Dunes again that morning so we could do a little wondering around and get on some of the actual hills. This was our first little trip since January 2020 and it was an absolute blast! We have missed traveling and exploring so much. This was a great mini-adventure to dip our toes back into traveling. We can’t wait to do more this summer!