Stony Lake Engagement | Maeve & MacKenzie At The Family Cottage With Their Dog
From the moment we started planning Maeve and MacKenzie's engagement photo session, I knew that it would be a really unique one.
The couple wanted to take me to MacKenzie's family cottage near Peterborough, on Stony Lake.
The only way to access this property, they told me, was by boat!
They were so sweet about this: Making sure I was okay with the boat ride, that my camera would be fine, and all.
But come hell or high-water (or boat…)
…There was no way I was going to pass up this opportunity to photograph a very unique engagement session on a family cottage property that was extremely meaningful to the couple, just because I was worried about my gear!
In fact, I've taken many boat rides with my camera, including one canoe ride fairly recently last summer (check out that blog here), and all was well :)
So, what I did to prepare my camera equipment was to put all of my various lenses and spare camera parts and bodies in separate Ziploc bags.
That way, should anything happen, at least everything would be in sealed bags... At the bottom of the lake haha.😂
I'm kidding, I was never really too worried about this. Plus, it’s all covered under insurance, hopefully!
(this reminds me that maybe a call to my insurance broker is appropriate. Topic of discussion: capsized boats⛵️)
The boat was a small motorboat (don’t ask me to go into any more detail than that… I’m fairly clueless), and it seemed extremely stable, and I was thrilled to see Mackenzie and Maeve come and meet me at the dock and pick me up for a short ride back to the cottage.
MacKenzie pulls up to McCracken’s Landing, Stony Lake, to the dock to pick me up and head to his family’s cottage for his engagement photo session with Maeve
The boat ride was only about five minutes or so. It was really scenic. Tall conifers lined the edges of all the land in view, and little islands popped up all around us.
I snapped this photograph of Maeve enjoying the short boat ride and taking in the scenery, with the wind whipping her hair.
Once we arrived near the dock, their adorable pup was waiting for them. She was super excited to see us all, and she ran around the forest in the property nearby gleefully the whole time we were photographing. We made sure she was in lots and lots of the shots as well! She’s their fur baby!
There is a church just across the water which I had to photograph, because it is an iconic property around these parts (I’m told). Everybody living or cottaging here knows about this church. We stopped at a lookout point to take a few candid photographs of Maeve and Mac.
The cottage and surrounding land has so much history. We took a walk around and MacKenzie told me a bit about this history.
There was an old anchor from a ship that sailed all the way from Scotland to this part of Ontario, laid anchor here and basically ended its life in these shores.
Back at the cottage, we explored the outbuildings. One of those outbuildings has a wall-to-wall bookcase with a bunch of vintage books. It was a beautiful space.
Maeve and MacKenzie took a few minutes to find a book and read a couple pages from, by an old wood stove.
The couple stand outside one of the cottage outbuildings, which houses a large library of vintage books.
The whole place just had so much charm. And outside, it was just as charming.
Nestled among trees right along on the water, was a large staircase, seeming to lead to nowhere.
The couple’s adorable dog plays with a stick and waits for it to be thrown again in this impromptu game of fetch during the engagement photosession
A little further down the path from the library house (as I have come to call it), there was a cute little dock.
Maeve and MacKenzie sat here and spent time looking out at the water, sharing those moments with their sweet pup. She loved all the quiet time and took every opportunity she could to lick her humans’ faces to show her love 🥰
This was a wonderful, unique engagement session.
I am so thankful Maeve and Mac we able to be so vulnerable, so open, so themselves.
You can probably tell by the very real and beautiful smiles on their faces in most of these photographs just how in love they are. And how much fun we had during our little time together. In all, the session took about an hour and a half, before they drove me back to the shore.
Maeve and Mac ride away on their boat back to the family cottage after our engagement session
(just in time, as it started to rain!)
I'm really excited for their wedding this summer, which will be at the Hidden Meadows in Tamworth.
And I'm also very excited and happy that they invited me over to this family cottage property on Stony Lake, because seeing family history and properties like this in Ontario really makes me feel like I understand the place a little more.
Being a non-native to Ontario (or Canada even), stories like these always make me feel a little bit more at home.
A beautiful rainbow sky I captured on my iPhone while driving home to Kingston from Peterborough after the engagement session