Garage Construction Theme Couples Shoot | Maddy + Ty

Picking a Photoshoot Theme

The holidays roll around every year and I start to think to myself what hobbies we love doing together that could make for a fun photoshoot. And I get asked all the time what’s do do for a couples shoot, anniversary, or engagement photoshoot. So I usually encourage people to think about their hobbies and what they like to do together as a couple. Well. This was the year that we renovated an entire house, so doing a construction themed couples shoot seemed very fitting for our brand as a couple.

Picking a Location

The easiest part about this was picking the location, but that is not always the case for a couples shoot. We easily could have chosen to go to a bar, restaurant, or public space where we were in people’s way. There’s many times where if you go to a public place for your shoot you need to call ahead and ask for permission. I always try to be respectful in those cases but also reassure the businesses that we will be paying customers and not be in the way or make a mess of any of their space.

In our case, we chose our own garage. it was intimate and already set up nicely as a backdrop. Cue Tyler building this workbench a month prior and hanging all the tools on the pegboard neatly. Also, with the. number of orange home depot buckets we have bought this past year we just HAD to include that as an element of our set design.

Posing Appropriately with Your Location and Theme

It wasn’t super complicated to pick outfits for this. I pretty much wore these overalls all summer while I was renovating. The tricky part was actually what Ty would wear. I always recommend to go for neutral colors and not be too match-y match-y when you are picking outfits for more than 1 person. I knew I would have all jeans so I asked him to wear a classic white tee and some darker boots. We definitely just threw these together with little effort but I think with the contrast of all the brightly colored tools the neutral and simple colors were the best solution for outfits.

Posing Editorially

I really wanted to focus on editorial style posing to contrast the grunge environment of the stinky garage. Okay it’s not actually stinky but you get my drift. It’s grunge.

I focused a lot on playing around with sitting on the workbench, using the corner of the bench, standing, and using the home depot bucket to sit on. I also knew it would be an absolute shame to not use the ladder and paint suits we spent many hours painting in. The ladder also provided a way to create different scenarios where we weren’t just posing in the garage. I could have Ty go up no the ladder and work on the light above. I’m not saying the Tyvek suits screams high fashion but I do think it gives a good variation as an outfit change to the whole scene. And I also liked how it matched the white shed we had painted along with the silver on the ladder. Not to mention we have the worlds coolest paint sprayer so why not show it off a little, right?

Flash and Lighting

I love the look of direct flash and thought it would be fun to incorporate different lighting conditions with the shoot. I thought of the idea of using our angle grinder because I knew it produces sparks. Reminded me somewhat of sparklers and night time but with that grunge construction shoot twist I was going for.