What’s better than beautiful weather on a Sunday? Yesterday we spent almost four hours at Rock Cut State Park in northern Illinois just walking around and enjoying all that mother nature has to offer. Of course, our cameras go wherever we go so we were able to capture some amazing shots, some which even surprised us.

The day started out gloomy in the morning so we figured it would be perfect for a hike, with the nice breeze keeping us cool. Well that quickly changed! By mid noon, the sun was out in full force and the humidity started to kick in. While photographers usually try to avoid the sun for portrait sessions, nature looks much better with the bright colors and high contrast that the sun provides. For this reason, we stuck to capturing just nature and the environments around us – which there was plenty of. One shot that we captured and that absolutely blew us away was a bee pollinating a plant and you can actually see the yellow pollen shoot out of the flower. We tried looking up images online and even looked through National Geographic and could not find anything like this. In photography, timing is everything!

One thing all these photos have in common is the color palette. Green, yellow and white seems to cover mother nature during the summer days (even though it’s September, it’s still technically summer). Before we took these pictures, we did not intend for all these pictures to fit the same color blocks but that’s just how things worked out. One very ironic fact is we are terrified of bees, but managed to get not one but two extreme close-ups of them. Once again the green and the yellow colors pop so much in these photos, we love it.

While there was a lot of butterflies flying around, one of them caught our attention. A pure white one, almost metallic looking, landed on the grass right in front of us. Now this might not be the most interesting photo, we still decided to share it just because it makes us happy.

This summer has been a very humid and sticky one so we haven’t been out as much as we wanted to at the beginning of the season. But then again, we’ve been quite busy with projects so we haven’t had as much free time. Fall is just around the corner and we are beyond excited to start doing fall shoots including nature and portraits.
Thank you to tagging along with us for our nature outing. We hope you enjoyed these few pictures… and feel free to contact us to book you fall portrait sessions.