3 Reasons You Must do an Engagement Session (especially if you have wedding planning anxiety/stress)

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!