Fuji had been hiding all day. We were meeting two men from Sydney for their Mt Fuji engagement photos, and the mountain was giving every indication that she had other plans. They’d never had a professional photo shoot before; by the end of the afternoon, we felt as though we’d known them for years.
We talked about Australia, about work, about the sort of things that make a conversation wander pleasantly away from its original subject. They were quiet, sweet, fascinating company. They also had excellent allergy medicine, which they shared with Dee, immediately making themselves indispensable.
It was mid-April around Lake Kawaguchi, with blossom along the water and snow still heavy on Fuji’s upper slopes. Cloud came and went across the summit. We got our glimpses, the afternoon gave us far more than a view, and the rain waited until the end.
The Mountain Appears in Its Own Time
You know the mountain’s shape before you arrive. You may have seen it so often that some part of your mind has already put you beneath it, in clear weather, with the person you love.
Standing beside the lake is a different experience. The scale becomes physical, and the sky keeps changing it. Fuji can be present in a glimpse of snow above the cloud, disappear while you’re talking, then return with enough of the mountain visible to make everyone look again.
Finding those openings takes local knowledge and attention. We’d been checking the Fuji live cameras through the day and drawing on our experience of where to go as conditions changed. There is a practical part to making pictures in a place like this, even when the finished photograph looks as though the mountain simply happened to be there.
The familiar outline became part of a photograph that could only belong to them.
We’ve had other afternoons at Fuji when the mountain came out in full. This one had its own character. The cloud made us pay attention, and the glimpses gave the afternoon a rhythm none of us could have written in advance.
Making Mt Fuji Engagement Photos Together
They were planning their wedding back home in Sydney. Here, before that, they’d given themselves an afternoon in Japan: a different place in which to mark the same relationship. We like the breadth of that decision, the way a marriage can begin to gather its memories before the wedding itself.
You can recognise Fuji from almost any image of it, but the mountain behind your partner’s shoulder is a different sort of recognition. You remember being close enough to take their hand, what the weather was doing, the conversation that carried on between photographs.
Later, the view can bring back the company you were in as readily as the place itself.
The ease with these two arrived quickly. They laughed hard sitting side by side, and after all the attention we’d paid to the sky, here was a photograph that depended entirely on what was happening between them.
Experience helps us make a connection quickly, but it also teaches us to notice when our own contribution can become smaller.
These LGBTQ engagement photos grew out of an afternoon we were thoroughly enjoying, with two men whose company we would happily have kept long after the shoot. The photographs needed to make room for their quietness as well as their laughter. There was an ease in being with them that we wanted the images to hold.
The camera became part of that company. When people have never been professionally photographed before, discovering that they can remain themselves is a useful beginning.
Blossom Beside the Water
The cherry trees along the lakeshore had begun showing their first leaves. Blossom was thinning in places, while elsewhere deep pink flowers held against bare branches. The season was moving unevenly around us, as seasons do when you spend enough time looking at them.
That is part of choosing spring in Japan. The blossom doesn’t arrive everywhere at once, and the country doesn’t spend the whole season beneath an uninterrupted blue sky. At Fuji, altitude shifts the timing, while the weather keeps its own counsel.
There was room in those photographs for a different kind of scale: the space around them, and the short distance between them.
We worked in colour and black and white. The blossom could have its pink, and other frames could settle into the relationship between a face, a hand, a dark suit and the water. A Kawaguchiko photoshoot can hold all of those things without needing every photograph to do the same work.
Further along, pale weeping cherry, shidarezakura, hung over a path. Their hands met beneath it, and they walked through the falling lines of blossom. In one photograph, the movement softens them, letting the act of walking together remain more prominent than any perfectly held pose.
We often think about what makes a photograph worth returning to. A remarkable view can draw someone towards it, but affection keeps them there. The way two people occupy that view together is what gives the image somewhere deeper to go.
What the Cloud Leaves Us
There’s a connection here with yūgen, the depth suggested by what we can only partly see. A mountain half inside cloud can make its presence felt beyond the part that is visible. The eye follows the slope, then carries on where the outline disappears.
We’re drawn to that in photographs, too: the sense that a life continues beyond the edges of the frame. We met these two for a short part of one afternoon. They had years of their own before we arrived, and a wedding waiting for them back in Sydney.
Our photographs could hold the time we shared, while leaving that larger relationship intact around it. There is humility in that. You pay close attention to what people let you see and make something they can bring their own knowledge to when they look at it later.
Spring rain arrived as we finished. By then we’d found the mountain, walked beside the lake, spent time beneath the blossom and talked our way into a familiarity that surprised us.
An Afternoon Worth Having
Our planning team can help shape time in Japan around the places that matter to a couple, and our photography begins with the people who will inhabit it. For these Mt Fuji engagement photos, that meant knowing when to look towards the mountain and when the more interesting thing was happening right beside us.
We hope our paths cross again. That was how we left them: glad of the photographs, certainly, and equally glad we’d had the afternoon. Sometimes you finish a shoot with people who began as an inquiry and now occupy a small, distinct place in your own memory.
Fuji will be in theirs, appearing through cloud. So will the lake, the blossom, and the person whose hand they were holding when the mountain finally showed. A place can be known all over the world and still become something private between two people.
