At 3:23 a.m. on May 9, Dan Iverson was crouched outside of Tyler Hasz and Ashley Molumby’s house in a hooded sweatshirt, rain slicker and black stocking cap. As he lifted his camera to his eye, a thousand worries went through his mind.

“I knew that so many things could go wrong,” Iverson said. “Ashley could turn her back to me. She could move out of my field of vision. She could see me there. She could say no.”

But instead, everything went right.

Molumby walked into the Mankato house she shares with Hasz and their son, Logan, right around 3:20, after her shift at Blue Bricks had ended. Hasz and 10-month-old Logan were waiting for her in the dining room, surrounded by a ring of glowing votive candles. Logan was wearing a T-shirt custom printed to say, “Will you marry my Daddy?”

As Iverson aimed his camera lens through an 8-inch gap in the dining room curtains, Hasz got down on one knee, opened a ring box and proposed to Molumby.

And without turning her back or moving out of Iverson’s field of vision, Molumby tearfully knelt next to Hasz and said yes.

“It worked out way better than I could have imagined,” Iverson said. “In less than three minutes, I shot 32 pictures. It was incredible.”

Although his presence might have looked suspicious to outsiders, Iverson was an invited guest at that most intimate of moments.

Not even 48 hours earlier, Hasz had called Iverson to find out if he could be in Mankato late Friday night. He was hatching a plan to propose to Molumby, and he wanted Iverson there to capture the moment for posterity.

Some couples have friends, waitresses or even complete strangers snap their pictures when they become engaged. Others set up self-timers on their own cameras to save the memory. Few are able to secure the services of a professional photographer for the occasion, both because the logistics can be difficult to arrange and because it’s almost impossible to guarantee how the question being asked will be answered.

But Iverson, a

professional photo-

grapher based out of Northfield, had been waiting for an opportunity like this to come up.

Iverson graduated from Minnesota State University and worked as a photojournalist

for newspapers for 10 years before starting Anthologie, a photo studio committed not just to taking beautiful photographs but also