THIS WILL BE THE FIRST INSTALLMENT IN A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON ENGAGEMENT PHOTOGRAPHY
Engagement photo of a lovely couple taken in romantic Venice, Italy.
So, you’re engaged? Congratulations! This has to be a very exciting time for both of you!
Booking an engagement photography session is a brilliant way to enhance your wedding photography experience! An engagement or pre-wedding photography session is a valuable experience which increases the value of a couple’s wedding photography. Please follow along as I share with you the reasons why engagement photos are so important!
The Opportunity to Get to Know Your Photographer
The engagement session is the perfect opportunity to spend some time with your photographer before your wedding day. During the session, you will learn about the way that your photographer shoots and poses you, which may feel strange at first but that will pass with time as your session goes on. Similarly, the photographer will get to know you as both people and as a couple. The engagement session gives the photographer the chance to see how you and your fiancé interact with each other, and with this experience, he or she will be better able to guide the two of you into natural, flattering, and genuine poses. Also, while these sessions do have a fixed time limit, you are certainly not pressed to make the perfect shots happen under the same time constraints as you would be on your wedding day. This is also the perfect time for the couple to build trust with their wedding photographer, which is very important as your photographer will be the one wedding professional who is around you for your entire wedding day.
You Will Become More Comfortable in Front of the Camera
Spending an entire engagement session in front of the photographer’s camera is essential to avoiding stiff and uncomfortable looking photos. The most frequent question that couples ask at the beginning of an engagement session, by far, is “Okay, what do you want us to do?”. This tells me that the couple may be a little nervous and unsure of what to expect from their session. That is actually a very normal reaction for people to have, as most people have not had their picture professionally taken by a photographer. At the beginning of an engagement session, I give the couple a few instructions about what to expect in order to get them to relax. While it may take a few minutes to get into the swing of things, they are having a ball before they know it, and then their true personalities begin to shine! Sometimes the groom-to-be is less than thrilled spending a portion of his day openly showing his affection for his fiancée. However, the time spent in the engagement session making the groom-to-be more comfortable connecting with and expressing his affection for his fiancée in front of the camera pays big dividends on the wedding day. The couple will be well-prepared for their wedding day photography. Ensuring that you are comfortable in front of the camera prior to your wedding will make for valuable experience come your wedding day.
Your Engagement Session Can Serve as a Hair & Make-Up Trial!
A well-prepared bride should surround herself with wedding professionals that are going to make her even more beautiful on her wedding day. In the course of her research, she will encounter some professionals such as make-up artists whose work she will like. However, the only way for a bride to know for sure how a make-up artist’s work will look on her is to get a make-up trial. Combining a hair & make-up trial with the engagement session is the perfect opportunity to see how your make-up is going to look in front of the camera on the wedding day. In addition, most brides who come to their engagement session with professional make-up application feel very excited and confident, knowing what to expect from their make-up artist and what adjustments, if any, need to be made on their wedding day. Women who typically wear little to no make-up in their daily lives may initially feel overwhelmed about their finished look from a professional make-up artist, but when they see their images from the engagement session, it’s almost always a decision that they are happy with in the end.
The Opportunity to Get Creative, Professionally Taken Photographs
How often does one get the opportunity to do an activity that you really enjoy with your fiancé while there is a professional photographer documenting every moment of it! Your engagement photos are great for save-the-date announcements. At Grayson Lee Photography, each of our engagement couples receive a complimentary signature portrait, which is a gorgeous 18” x 24” matted print of an image which our couples select from their engagement photography session. This is a treasured keepsake which is presented at the wedding reception for the guests to sign and makes for a great memento of your wedding.
When is the best time to take our engagement photos?
This is a great question which has several answers. Generally the best time to take engagement photos is anywhere from 6 months to one year before your wedding. If you wait longer than that, couples may come up with new ideas several months later and want to take additional photos, thus causing them to incur an additional engagement session fee that they could have otherwise avoided. Couples that have waited until the last minute or too close to their wedding date risk finding that they simply did not have enough time to schedule in the engagement session and, as a result, the engagement session never got done.
I hope that this information assists you in your wedding planning and inspires you to capture the special moments that make up your unique love story. Please check back next week for the second article in our Engagement series about how to choose a location for your engagement session!