People don't often talk about the behind the scenes of engagement photos, or at least they didn't to me.
Finding the photographer isn't the only battle. Taking engagement photos together was so much fun because we spent most of our time hiking around (one of my absolute favorite things to do!), but also incredibly awkward because we are both camera shy. Luckily, our photographer was amazing. He was telling us jokes, getting us laughing. He was so easy to work with and he got the pictures to us the next day! He was very good about fulfilling requests and listening to what we wanted him to do. Just a few things to keep in mind when you're about to take engagement photos:
- Consider time constraints. Time is VERY important. Especially time of day and lighting. To get the most of the most flattering natural light, you need to consider the time you will spend traveling to the area (sometimes you'll have to transport the photographer yourselves), the time you spend walking from area to area, time spent posing, etc and try to utilize as much of that perfect natural light as you can.
- Treat your engagement session like a dress rehearsal. Most likely your engagement session is being done by the same person that is doing your wedding photos, so use this time to get comfortable with your wedding look and with your photographer. (Although we had different photographers for both our engagements and wedding photos, it was still good practice for us to get used to working with someone else and learning to be comfortable in front of a camera)
- Collect ideas. I would advise collecting pictures you want to mimic and showing them to your photographer. Your photographer doesn't know what you want unless you tell them, so you can't get mad at them if you don't get the pictures you want because it's no one's fault but yours. Showing my photographer pictures I wanted made some of my very favorite pictures possible.
- Don't get too specific with your engagement picture ideas though! You don't want everything to look posed. The most important thing to remember when taking your engagements is to just be yourselves.
- YOU DON'T NEED TO SPEND A LOT OF MONEY ON ENGAGEMENT PHOTOS. They aren't a big deal. If you are on a budget, spend less on the engagements so you can spend more on the wedding. I'm no photographer, but I took my friend's engagement photos for her and they turned out great (if I do say so myself).
Some of my friend's engagements that I took for her:This couples' engagement session was absolutely free. If you are on a tight budget, and you know someone with access to a nice camera, you seriously might want to consider going this route.
- Location can be very important. What looks great for some engagements isn't necessarily great for you. I had a friend take some amazing engagement photos in a library, but Michael and I could never have pulled those off because that is not our relationship at all. We are outdoorsy people so we wanted our engagements to be outdoors. You don't have to have a specific location in mind. I told my photographer I wanted mountains and green. He said "I know a perfect place." That was that! Most photographers have plenty of great locations in mind that they are used to shooting at. Unfortunately for us, we had to take our engagements at the end of winter so our environment wasn't very pretty yet. The gorgeous background of the images I took for my friend were in California, but Michael and I are currently living in a state that has real winters :/
- What to wear: We didn't stress about this too much. Just don't wear white I've heard it's very unflattering and can ruin images by being too bright. I just picked a general color scheme and told Michael to grab clothes those colors. He stressed about it way more than I did, so the majority of the clothes pile you see him carrying was actually HIS.
Some of OUR engagement photos:
You can see the awkward just emanating from several of these because it took us so long to get comfortable. But despite our awkward laughs and at times very posed looks, some of our pictures miraculously turned out all right :)
