With Love, from Berlin—Adventures through Botanical Gardens + the City
Ethan and I went out to Germany back in February for a work trip of his in Munich. I had reached out on a photography community page looking for any interested couples to meet up with and shoot, which you never know if it’s going to work out or not, but thought I’d throw it out there! Ria got ahold of me, and I’m SO happy she did! We had already extended our trip so that we could see another German City, and were going to be exploring Berlin for a few days, which is where Ria + Axel call home.
We were trying so hard to not be too damn American, and use all the public transportation, but we hit one little bump in booking our city rail passes—we thought we could use and app to scan our passes on our phone, but we had to physically print them out. Our adorable airbnb in Prenzlauer Berg didn’t have a printer, so we hopped around from print shop to print shop trying to murmur “can we get this printed here?” from a terrible google-translation (lol), and we could not figure it out!
So we took a taxi to the Botanischer Garten, where we were going to meet Ria and Axel for a photo session, and they instantly welcomed us and made us feel at home in their city. We wandered through the botanical garden, through some of the old cobblestone streets, and then they offered to take us to a print shop to help us print our rail passes! The sweetest thing, that they didn’t have to do, for silly-old us…lol.
Without missing a beat, they had our things printed out for us within minutes. They brought us to one of their favorite neighborhood spots to eat, and we just discussed all of their travels as a couple, their weddings plans, and just laughing about mine and ethan’s lack of travel. Ria also had it on her bucketlist to take photos of the two of them in the underground (which I was 100% on board with), so we headed to the subway for some moody, gritty, romantic shots. After we finished, they walked us to our train to make sure we got on the right route back to our airbnb, and we agreed we could not have met a kinder, genuine, more madly in love couple than these two.
So thankful that photography brings me closer to people from all-around, and opens me up to get out of my comfort zone. Scroll through to see the Berlin adventures with Ria and Axel.
