Welcome to Suzy & Nick’s Syracuse fall engagement photos blog post!

I am also so excited to welcome these two as a  Team Hawkins Couple and Suzy as a Team Hawkins Bride!  We have such a great group of brides that keep in touch and help each other out with different aspects of their wedding planning!  At least once a year all our Team Hawkins Brides get together to hang out!

If you had been with us on the morning of their engagement session you wouldn’t have called this a fall session!  The temperature on my car dash read 20 degrees when I arrived at the Erie Canal to meet up with Suzy and Nick.

I arrived in my long, down feather coat, white Philadelphia Flyers hat on and grey mittens.   Randomly the gloves were given to me by a friend way back when I was a college student in Chicago… the kind of mitten that seems like fingerless gloves when you put your hand inside but that has the mitten top that flips over your fingers when you need it (which is SO helpful when trying to operate the buttons and dials on my camera while shooting)!  And let me tell you, I was chilly.  As you can see from their engagement photos, neither Suzy or Nick wore coats, hats or mittens!  They are SERIOUSLY impressive!

Not only do these two get points for braving the cold 20 degrees weather, but they actually drove from Rochester to Syracuse for their 9am engagement session that morning!

We met up the Saturday after Thanksgiving because they were actually in town for the holiday.  I was so excited to learn that both Nick and Suzy live in Chicago currently… only a mile or so from Moody Bible Institute where I went to college!  As we chatted during their engagement session I learned that Suzy is a Special Ed teacher on the west side of the city and Nick works in the financial district in the loop.  As we talked about the brown line and the underground red line of the “L” and it totally took me back to those cold and WINDY winters in Chicago.

After about 20 minutes of shooting the section of pictures above, we definitely needed to jump back into our cars to warm up!

After shooting a bit more down at the Erie Canal Park, we headed just down the road to the Camillus Unique Forest Area!  Because its now “stick season” in Syracuse NY we wanted some color in the photos and the evergreens at the Forest Area are, well, always green!

These two are so cute together!  They’re both from the Rochester area which actually is where they met!

Nick shared that he grew up playing sports including football as well as downhill skiing in the CNY area.  And I know from my experience of living in Chicago that if you want to do any downhill skiing or snowboarding (which is MY jam!), you have to head up to Wisconsin where they have some semblance of hills to snowboard down!

I am so looking forward to getting to know Nick and Suzy better in the months leading up to their wedding day this coming July at Belhurst Castle in Geneva, NY! If you’d like to see more engagement photos, check them out here or come on over to our Team Hawkins page to meet Andrew and I!

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