TUESDAY, MARCH 14, 2017

Hey, hi, hello everyone! It’s finally spring and this is the perfect post to celebrate that! Since I didn’t have a lot of finals during finals week (they were all the week before for some reason…), I had the chance to go out for another photo shoot last Tuesday after work. This time it was with my friend, David, and he had found an awesome place to shoot around campus: Chino Hills State Park. So, after work, he picked me up and we set out to reach the park and beat the sunset. Luckily, it was the week right after daylight savings, so we ended up having a good couple hours of exploring before the sun went down.

Outfit:
Sunglasses: Tag Envy // Necklace: Forever 21 // Top: Zara // Belt: OOTDFash // Shorts: Hollister // Shoes: Converse

Photography:
Photographer: David Lui // Camera: Sony a6000

The original plan was to find a meadow full of colorful flowers that David had seen on Instagram and that was supposed to be somewhere in the park. However, once we finally arrived at Chino Hills State Park (which I had no idea existed so close to my campus), we realized just how big of a place that park was… If you could even really call it a park. It seemed more like a nature reserve or something rather than a “park.” Either way, we parked at the bottom of the entrance to the park and started to make our way up to the main road trail. I soon realized that this shoot was going to be more of a hike than anything else, but we were determined to find some good places to take pictures.

So, we pretty much discovered that finding the field of flowers was going to be impossible considering we had no idea where we were or where we were going. However, we did our best to make the most out of all the green-the lots and lots of green-that was surrounding us. There was actually a lot of great photo opportunities, including cute wooden fences, a nice open road, and semi-flowery and green backgrounds. Once we reached one of the top points of the road, we came across some bathrooms. Here, I changed into another outfit that I had brought in a backpack along with me. Since it seemed as though the background was going to stay one color, at least I had another outfit to add some variety to David’s photos.

Outfit:
Necklace: Forever 21 // Top: Brandy Melville // Shorts: Brandy Melville // Shoes: Converse

David was fun to work with, too. He was pretty good at giving direction and telling me what poses he wanted and where he wanted me to stand. This is so helpful when it comes to things like this, especially since I have no clue what I’m doing most of the time. Still, it was pretty much a perfect day outside and nothing was going to ruin my mood. The weather was amazing and it was great to get away from everything and be surrounded by all the greenery (minus all the giant black beetles that were crawling around… eek).

After a bunch of different backgrounds, poses, and about two hours of walking, the sun was finally starting to go down. We headed back to the car, stopping to take a few more pictures on the way down. It was honestly so amazing to have found such a cool and beautiful place so close to my campus, as I had no idea at all that it was there or that Chino Hills was a such a huge city. Overall, it was a great day and a great photo shoot with David, and it was even better that we ended up getting In-N-Out for dinner afterward. I mean, I’d definitely worked up an appetite after having just hiked around in the heat for two hours…

xo, Rachel