So how should I propose to the love of my life? That was the question I was asking myself for quite awhile. I’m not generally an overly romantic type of guy, like someone who brings home flowers every week or writes the occasional love poem. But I do like to get the big stuff right at least and I figured a marriage proposal might be up high on that list of big stuff. So how should I propose to the love of my life? I knew there are plenty of proposal ideas out there on the internet but I also knew that I wanted to do something that was unique and special to us specifically. I wanted to incorporate a place or an idea that really meant something to both of us. And then finally, one day, it hit me. We both love photography. I should incorporate that somehow.
And that led me to the idea of photographing the exact moment of the proposal allowing us to always visually relive that exact moment of our lives together.
At that time, adjoining my dad’s property was a hill you could climb with a beautiful vista that overlooked the mountains at sunset. Today there is a house that sits upon that hill but at the time it was just pasture land.
So on April 12, 2003 I convinced Tracie to go take some sunset pictures with me atop this hill. I essentially told her we were gonna take some “couple selfies” with the beautiful sunset view behind us and of course she was all game for that.
So I setup the camera on a tripod and had her go stand where we would be standing for the photo so I could get the camera settings right and set it on a ten second timer. When everything was just perfect, I pressed the shutter and the timer started ticking as I hurried over to where Tracie was.
No doubt she was expecting me to stand right up next to her, put my arm around her and pose for the picture. But her eyes got wide as saucers when, instead, I got down on one knee, pulled out a sparkling diamond ring, waited a couple of seconds for the picture to take and then asked her to marry me.
Now we have something extremely special that most people don’t have… a photograph of our proposal!
