Josh + Jenny | Fairmount Park Horticulture Center | Philadelphia, PA


Josh and Jenny decided to have their engagement shoot at the Horticulture Center at Fairmount Park. Despite a cloudy start to the day, and a bit of rain, nothing stopped us from producing some beautiful signature images from the shoot. If anything, the umbrella in some of the pictures adds to the romance of the session.
Above are the epic fountains on the Horticulture Center grounds. The Horticulture Center was built in 1979 on the same grounds as the 1876 Horticultural Hall, a Centennial Exposition building.
We started the shoot on the lush grounds of the Horticulture Center. In April, they are in full bloom and we found a wonderful bed of tulips that clamored for pictures among them. We happily obliged.
Next we headed over to the building itself which is quite symmetrical so of course we needed to do an epic environmental portrait in front of the main entrance.
The entrance to the Horticulture Center has a gorgeous accessible ramp with metal railings which are excellent leading lines for photography purposes, so we used that fact to create some romantic images on the ramp.
Once we finally got to the top of the ramp, the entire facade of the building are these rectangular glass semi-transparent panels so as a photographer, I knew this was a fantastic place to play with reflections.
I noticed immediately opposite the main entrance to the building was a brick facade so we stopped for a few short pictures there and I shot through the potted plants at the top of the ramp to add some foreground bokeh into the shot.
The greenhouse inside is gorgeous and it is difficult to take a bad picture inside such a delightful building. I’ll let the images speak for themselves.
One remarkable feature is the greenhouse itself had a variety of walls of different colors and textures to make the shooting possibilities and colors almost endless.
After a stint in the greenhouse, we went outside for some closing images by the epic fountains as well as the treeline at the end of the fountains which provide amazing leading lines.