Few things are as joyous as planning a wedding. And few things are as stressful and anxiety inducing. There’s so many details to plan, decisions to make, sometimes family rifts to navigate, and there’s dozens of vendors and venues laid out in front of you. Eventually, you settle on a venue, put down a deposit. You now have an official date (yay!) and probably the next big vendor to cross off your list is photographer. This may be were some anxiety kicks in for you. How do you know your photographer will mesh well with your personalities? What if he or she doesn’t give enough direction to pose you and your fiance or poses you in weird, awkward ways? Will you like the way you look in your photos? Will your photographer be able to keep your timeline running smoothly on your wedding day or will they be the thing that derails it? Will your images be well posed while still capturing your personalities? Most importantly, will you be happy with the final images you recieve?
An engagement session with your wedding photographer is just the cure for many of those worries and anxieties (perfectly normal, by the way) and will benefit you and your fiance in so many ways!
The first major benefit of an engagement session is that you and your fiance will get to work one on one with your photographer. You get introductions and that little bit of awkwardness that happens when you meet someone new out of the way long before your wedding day. We like to chat and ask questions throughout our engagement sessions so that we get to know more about the two of you and you’ll also get to know more about Doug and I. We’ll talk about things like how you met each other, how your proposal happened, your wedding plans so far, and what hobbies and activities you like to do as a couple. We get to know your personalities and what poses you love (and what ones you don’t) which helps us prepare for photographing your wedding. We want for you to walk away from your engagement session feeling like you just made two new friends, relaxed, and excited to work with us again on your wedding day!
You’ll also get comfortable with posing during your session. We’ll get a feeling for what poses and prompts work well for your personalities and tweak them so they show the best side of you. When we get your edited engagement photos back, you’ll see how amazing you look and be super excited for how amazing you’ll look in your wedding photos! We’re well versed in posing. We also realize couples come in all different shapes, sizes, and physical strengths (i.e. are you able to lift your fiance up or dip them low?) and not every pose and prompt will work well for every couple. We’ll start by guiding your through some easier poses and then work our way up to the more difficult ones depending on your comfort level. Doug and I will never force you into a pose that is awkward or totally uncomfortable for the two of you. We’ll also tweak and adjust poses as we go to make them natural and comfortable for you and your fiance!
This helps you to get comfortable and confident being in front of the camera, teaches you little posing tips that will be second nature by the end of the session, builds trust with your photographer, and gives you confidence when you get your engagement photos back that your photographer can make you and your fiance look as amazing as the photos in their portfolio that you fell in love with before booking them! Knowing that you will look incredible in your wedding photos because you look incredible in your engagement session is a huge stress reducer. It also helps us to get through your portraits quicker on your wedding day (when time is tight and there’s a schedule to stick to!) while ensuring we get lots of beautiful, album-worthy photos of you and your new spouse.
Imagine having a few hours to spend with your arms wrapped around your fiance, looking deeply into their eyes, taking a chance to cuddle close, lay your head on their shoulder, breathe in their scent and think about all the reasons you fell in love , think about why you’re choosing to spend the rest of your lives together! A final benefit that is so overlooked is the chance to just step away from the chaos and stress that is wedding planning (at times or maybe all the time depending who you ask) and be present in the moment with your fiance. We love seeing tension fade and our couples laugh with each other and with us as the session goes on. You can think of your engagement session as a date night of sorts. Doug and I will guide you through poses and prompts that will having you laughing, sharing sweet moments and physical contact with each other.
We believe so strongly that having an engagement session with your wedding photographer is highly beneficial to our couples that we include a deluxe engagement session(up to 3 hours with us and as many locations and outfit changes as you can fit into that time!) with all of our core wedding photography packages (6, 8, and 10 hour packages). We know that having that session will help you feel comfortable with Doug and I and confident in front of our cameras, excite you for your wedding photos, and give you some much needed quality time with your fiance during a time when emotions and stress are often running high!
We love planning amazing engagement sessions for our couples! From choosing locations to picking just the right outfits we can help! Let’s get started planning your session today!
The holidays are here and the perfect time to propose for many couples is near! There’s no time like December to get down on one knee and pop the question; friends and family are near and can be involved, the snow is sparkling outside (and we haven’t gotten sick of it yet), there’s cuddles by the fire and kisses beneath the mistletoe and an undeniable kind of magic hanging in the air.
You’ve spent the last few months planning the perfect way to ask, picking out a gorgeous ring, and choosing just the right location. You’ve put so many hours of hard work making sure everything will be just perfect, so don’t make the critical mistake of not hiring the right photographer team to capture these once-in-a-lifetime moments! And if you’re planning on popping the question, but you need a little help finalizing the details, Katie and Doug Photography can help with that too!
We’ve photographed many proposals and we’ve advised couples on amazing locations, bluetooth speakers, setting everything up, and timing everything out. We can give you as much help and advice (or as little) as you want! We know what kind of timing will work best. We know how to keep our distance and still photograph every moment without it being super obvious that you’ve hired a photography team because you’re about to propose.
After you’ve popped one of the most important questions in your life, we spend the rest of the session photographing beautiful portraits of you and your new fiance. We know how and where to pose you so you don’t have to worry about any of that; you can just soak up all those beautiful afterglow feelings while we work to create the perfect images for your Facebook and Instagram “We’re engaged!!!” post. The second half of your proposal session is pretty much a mini engagement session. These portraits can be used as we mentioned on social media, your online gallery can be shared with family and friends across the globe, and these make great Save-the-date photos (and we can totally help you design and print your save-the-dates through the professional lab we use).
We saved for last the most important reason why it’s a mistake to not hire a photographer for your proposal; because all that blood, sweat, and tears and months of planning that went into your proposal will be compressed into a few blink-of-the-eye moments that you can only watch from one point of view. Katie and Doug Photography uses two photographers (and you always get both of us, Katie and Doug) and we shoot from different spots, one of us photographing you and one photographing your fiance-to-be. Suddenly each one those quick seconds (that feel like an eternity when you’re standing in front of your partner with a lump in your throat and a ring in your pocket) becomes a photograph and together those photos paint a very vivid and dynamic picture of the proposal you worked so hard for to be perfect.
This is your history. Don’t let it slip through your fingers with nothing to preserve it for your children, nieces and nephews, grandchildren, and all the future generations in your family. Hire a photographer team; you’ve spent so much time planning and choosing that stunning ring, your proposal is so worth having photographed, no matter how complex or how simple, intimate or surrounded by dozens of friends and family. You won’t regret having those moments preserved forever.
Let’s talk about your proposal today.
It’s crazy to think we’re already three months into 2021 and a year into the Covid-19 pandemic. Our family has been super busy lately between having a baby, adjusting to being a family of four, moving into a new house, and wrapping up editing and album designing from the end of last year’s weddings! Now that things are slowing down and becoming less hectic, I want to stop and make a blog post about some updates coming in 2021.
First of all, we are still booking for both 2021 and 2022. We’re still facing a lot of reschedules from couples who had planned on getting married this year, postponing to 2022. So if you’re planning on being a 2022 bride, book your vendors early! You’re not only competing with other 2022 brides for dates, but with 2020 and 2021 brides who are rescheduling for next year.
Secondly, I’ve been working on restructuring our wedding and engagement packages to include things that Doug and I feel are important such as including an engagement session with every wedding package (engagement sessions are the best way to get to know your photographers and get comfortable in front of the camera before the big day!) and having a more deluxe level of packages that includes not only the engagement session, but a high quality, heirloom worthy album. This will come with an increase in cost (obviously if you’ve already booked with us, your price will stay the same as when you booked us, no worries!). This increase allows us to include wonderful things in our wedding packages such as deluxe engagement sessions, luxurious albums and other high quality printed products and wall art.
Speaking of albums and print products, I’ve been working to build up a nice collection of samples, everything from sample giclee prints to samples of signature books and albums. You won’t have to guess about what a product is going to look like, because we can show you and you can touch and feel it and get an up close look. Every time something comes in the mail from our print lab, I’m blown away and I truly hope to be able to share that wonderful feeling with more couples this year and next. If you’re on the fence about an album of your wedding day, I want to change your mind! And if you’re interested in displaying your photos on the wall, I can definitely help with that and recommend some options such as metal prints that come all ready to hang. I recently purchased 3 8x10 metal prints for our living room. The colors are super vivid and bright and grouped together on the wall they look amazing and really give a home-y and cozy feel!
Also in the works are several blog posts from end of 2020 weddings and blog posts about wedding related issues, such as planning your timeline and a complete engagement session guide which will answer all the most common questions we get from couples before their session such as what to wear, how to pose, and how to choose a location! I’m so excited to get these guides done and out there because I truly believe they will be so helpful for our couples! In the meantime, feel free to continue to reach out to us with your wedding planning questions!
All the best,
Katie
