We were on our way down to North Carolina to the Outer Banks for a family vacation. The worst thing to happen to a photographer is not having their camera during a special moment. Read more to find out the FULL story of what happened on our family vacation:

I knew my sister’s boyfriend (now fiancé!) was going to propose at the end on Friday. Unfortunately the worst thing to ever happen to us photographers happened…my camera bag got left in the car that didn’t come down to OBX with us. I could have put myself down the whole time and felt like a failure.

Instead I went into survival mode and rented a lens to our AirBnB, since I found that I had a camera body in another bag. Well I had no battery, no memory card, or lens. K, so I went to Walmart and bought a memory card. Unfortunately they had no batteries. It was setting in now I was feeling like a complete failure.

My sister was about to get engaged right before my eyes (my artistic photography eyes – without a professional camera)

I took it to Facebook groups and told the story. The photography community is ONE OF THE BEST! Multiple people commented and reached out to help me figure out how to make these images happen!

I was about to drive an hour and a half to meet a girl who was going to lend me a camera battery the night before. My family didn’t know the proposal was happening so they didn’t understand my stress of getting a camera on our last day of vacation.

As I was getting defeated and full of anxiety, I finally took a breath and told myself – it’s fine. Many people do iPhone photos for proposals. Not everyone has a photographer in their family. As soon as I released all the stress, someone commented who was 10 minutes away from me saying I could borrow their entire camera. (It was a Nikon and I shoot Canon)

I believed this was a sign and that it was meant to be. This woman let me borrow her life, basically. Lending it to a complete stranger. I am so grateful and humbled by this community. The support I feel is huge, I am so grateful. The love is radiating from every inch of my body!

Fonzie proposed on his birthday. All he wanted for his birthday was my sister, forever. He secretly knew she was going to source videos from his family and friends to put together saying Happy Birthday. He had recorded a little something to interrupt the video to propose. I had made a shorter version of this video for him so when she went to show him his video it wasn’t the entire video she was expecting.

We woke up at the crisp hour of 6am to watch the sunrise. It was pretty hard to get my parents on board. They’ve seen sunrises, they’re on vacation, they don’t want to wake up early. Without giving it away we got them to agree to come. Thankfully everyone was there to see this milestone happen in our lives!

Congratulations to my sister and her now fiancé!! I love you guys!