Words & photographs by Moment Makers Media
Kings Park is, without much argument, Perth's most-loved backdrop for engagement and pre-wedding photography — and once you've stood on the Fraser Avenue lookouts with the whole city skyline spread out below, it's easy to see why. We met Kayla and Brett about an hour before sunset for their complimentary pre-wedding photography session, and spent the golden hour moving between the lookouts, the old eucalypt-lined pathways and the open lawns that make Kings Park such a genuinely beautiful place to photograph a couple.
Kings Park sits high enough that you don't get a dramatic dropping sun — the hills to the east take care of that before the sky has a chance to properly colour up — but what you do get, every single evening, is a long, soft, golden light filtering through the trees. It's forgiving, it's flattering, and if you know how to work with it, it's some of the best natural light Perth has to offer for portraits. That's exactly what we chased with Kayla and Brett for this session.
We started at one of the Fraser Avenue lookouts, where Kings Park's famous view of the Perth city skyline and the Swan River opens up all at once. It's one of the most photographed views in Western Australia for a reason — few cities let you stand in open bushland and look straight down onto a skyline like this. For Kings Park photography specifically, this is the shot most couples come here for, and we made sure Kayla and Brett had it in colour and in black and white.
From the lookouts, we walked in through Kings Park's bushland pathways — tall eucalypts, dappled light, the kind of laneways that look completely different depending on which direction you're facing at golden hour. This is the part of a Kings Park pre-wedding photography session most couples don't expect: it isn't just the skyline. There's a genuine variety of backdrops within a ten-minute walk of each other, from open parkland to bushland corridors to formal garden stairways.
This is the light we come to Kings Park for — not a dramatic sunset, but a long, soft golden hour that flatters everyone standing in it.
We don't stick to one formula for a Kings Park photography session, and this is where our approach really comes through — a bit of playfulness, a lift and a laugh, using the whole width of a pathway rather than posing in one static spot. That's the creativity we try to bring to every location, no matter how many times we've shot there before.
The last stretch of light is always our favourite window of a Kings Park pre-wedding photography session — the moment the park empties out a little, the light turns properly gold, and everyone relaxes into the last twenty minutes of the shoot. This is when we slow down and go looking for the small architectural details Kings Park is full of: the old stone stairways, the archways of bushland, the quiet corners most visitors walk straight past.
You don't need a dramatic sunset to get beautiful photos in Kings Park — you need good light, a relaxed couple, and a team who knows how to use both.
As the light dropped properly gold, we found a quiet corner beneath one of Kings Park's enormous old trees and let Kayla and Brett have a minute without any direction from us at all. These are usually the photographs couples end up loving most — not the posed ones, but the ones where they've forgotten we're there.
If you're researching Kings Park photography for your own engagement or pre-wedding shoot, it's worth knowing that Kings Park requires a permit for any proposal or wedding photography that isn't tied to an on-site ceremony booking. As of this year that's $100 per hour through the Botanic Gardens and Parks Authority, plus a small non-refundable booking fee — details that are easy to miss if you're planning a shoot yourself. When Kayla and Brett booked their pre-wedding session with us, we handled the permit and the timing around sunset so all they had to do was show up.
Thank you, Kayla and Brett, for a genuinely relaxed evening at Kings Park. We can't wait to bring everything we learned about you both to your wedding day.
Congratulations again, Kayla & Brett. ❤️
