A Russian Ridge Picnic on Valentine’s Day is hopefully going to be a tradition for us! This is the second year that we’ve done it, followed by homemade sushi with friends for dinner. At first, Sam was thinking we should find a place other than Russian Ridge for our picnic. After a little research, we decided why mess with a good thing? 😉

It was actually pretty funny, because we weren’t too sure where the hill we used for our picnic last year was. I mean, we knew it was at Russian Ridge, but once we started walking, I kept on asking, “Is that our hill? No… maybe that one? Surely we’re there already!” After a little bit, I got tired of walking, so I pointed at the next hill and said that even if it wasn’t our hill, it was going to be our hill, haha! We started walking up and I knew that we definitely hadn’t taken that path up last year. Lo and behold, we made it to the top of the hill and saw OUR HILL right down another path! So we ended up on our hill after all, despite taking a different way up there 😉

As I mentioned in my post about our Valentine’s Day picnic last year, Sam bought me a picnic basket complete with a set of all utensils, a little cutting board, a cheese knife and corkscrew. This isn’t the exact one, but here’s a similar one! We went for bottled water instead of cider or wine this year, so we didn’t need the corkscrew, but the cutting board was perfect for our brie! We paired our brie with pears, salami and rosemary and olive oil triscuits, which are amazing combinations, in case you’re wondering.

When I opened up the basket, I saw a paper cutout SUR at the top. Sam and I have been meaning to go to Big Sur for almost a year now, and apparently he found a good deal with Hyatt points, so we’re going to go in March! I’m super excited and will be sure to share photos.

I’m sure you all know by now that no photoshoot with Sam is complete without some silly photos!

I can’t wait for our Russian Ridge picnic next year! Maybe we’ll even pull out the picnic basket sometime in between, haha! Certainly the weather is nice enough to have a picnic whenever we want. Last year I just used my Fuji, but I decided it would be a lot easier to use the Mark III and tripod this time… and I was even smart enough to bring along a remote, which made taking these pictures easy. We picnicked from about 2:00-3:00PM, which is obviously not typically ideal lighting, but direct light can be a lot of fun and you can still get striking images with it. Direct light is definitely something Melina and I will be covering in Composing Boldly with Light. With the full sun, I could close down the aperture quite a bit, meaning I didn’t need to worry too much about focusing carefully.

Contact me or email me at alice@aliceche.com to book your own picnic session at Russian Ridge or anywhere in the Bay Area!

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Alice Che is a San Francisco Bay Area photographer specializing in wedding, engagement, couple and boudoir photography. Serving the South Bay, Peninsula, and East Bay: San Jose, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Redwood City, San Carlos, Burlingame, Los Altos, Milpitas, Union City, Fremont, Berkeley, El Cerrito and surrounding areas.