We are excited to bring you another informative blog from Neil Photography. Some of you may be looking for your photographers or even getting ready to take your engagement photos.
First and foremost, congrats on your engagement – this is an exciting time for you both! Engagement sessions are a great chance for you to have fun, let loose, and enjoy the new found excitement from your recent proposal.
They can come in a number of different varieties:
1. Ad hoc engagement photos with a wedding photographer that won’t be shooting your wedding.
2. Engagement session with your wedding photographer (recommended!)
3. Engagement photos after your wedding with your wedding photographer (only if you don’t have enough time prior to the wedding; not recommended)
One hidden secret behind the engagement session is getting comfortable in front of the camera of your photographer – most couples don’t regularly model and spend their free time in front of a professional photographer firing off shots behind a large lens.
The first thing that usually happens is that you and your fiancé will tense up, since, like most people, you’re both not accustomed to being the center of attention in front of a stranger.
After a few minutes (or hours), you both will loosen up – but the hidden goal of an engagement session isn’t only to get some awesome pictures to post up on Facebook, your wedding homepage, or save-the-date refrigerator magnets, but rather to develop a rapport with your wedding photographer.
That dynamic and vibe you establish with your photographer will seamlessly carry through on your big day, so that without even knowing it, you and your fiancé will be even more comfortable in front of the camera and enable those ad hoc, photo journalistic shots that you will take home and relish in your wedding album!
Another key element to the engagement shoot is location: I always suggest a location that holds sentimental value of some sort, because your memories will overtake your emotions and both of you will forget you’re in front of a camera. You can find dramatic locations for a shoot, and some couples choose to do that if they’re comfortable in front of a camera, but more often than not, the pictures
will come out with awkward and tense expressions because the location is either foreign, distracting, awkward, or there are a lot of strangers gawking at you both congratulating you on your upcoming nuptials. This is couple specific, however, and
as you can tell from the couple below, in the middle of NYC’s Central Park, nothing else in the world existed but their love.
The final element is the concept of continuity I was hinting at above. You can certainly get an amazing deal with ad hoc photographers to capture your engagement photos, and some couples will opt for this in place of a professional wedding photographer if they’re bargain hunting (since engagement shoots can fall below the $1,000 mark often). However, many professional wedding photographers offer
engagement shoots gratis as part of their wedding packages – this works financially in your favor rather than doing it a la carte package with one and a package with another.
As always, I’m happy to be a resource and helpful guide – email me at neil@neilphotos.com, and come check out my blog for some engagement shots: www.neilphotos.com/blog.
