Beautiful morning light, a stylish & adorable couple, and the whole place to ourselves

I met Cindy and Ben at Scorpion Gulch in South Mountain Park at 8:00 on a weekday morning. I assumed we'd be jockeying for the best locations since it's a pretty popular destination among local photographers, and for good reason. I was wrong. the only other human being present when I arrived was a park ranger doing his rounds. What luck!

Then Cindy and Ben arrived, and I counted myself double lucky... what a stylish couple with the absolute BEST attitudes. We had so much fun wandering around what remains of the one-time-home, and playing in the beautiful dancing light of a still-too-hot Phoenix September morning.

South Mountain Park is huge... in fact, it's one of the largest municipally managed parks in the country. It is a self-proclaimed "urban" park that offers miles upon miles of gorgeous desert hiking trails many of which boast a view of the Phoenix skyline.

With that sort of resource at our finger tips we couldn't finish the shoot without at least venturing a little further into the park! So we headed over to the Holbert trailhead and had some fun in the desert mountain landscape.