Here is the deal with engagement sessions – Sure, they can be a nice way to get used to being photographed. Many photographers insist on doing an engagement session for exactly this reason. And, while I always enjoy spending an evening with my clients, I just don’t think that taking engagement photos are necessary to having great wedding images. Engagement photos should not be about the photography experience, they should be about you as a couple.
When you have wedding photos, they will always represent a very specific day in your life – the day you got married. You will probably have your hair and clothing different than normal life. You won’t have a lot of spare time to wonder and explore during your wedding day because you will be focused on being will all the people in your life that you care about most.
But engagement photos are a change to capture a little bit of the essence of you as a couple. What it is like to just be together on a normal weeknight? How do you explore new environments together? How do you tell jokes with each other?
That is why I love shooting engagement sessions before a wedding – because they capture a totally different aspect of your relationship.
So, Caity and Adam, thank you for a very fun evening of walking and talking and laughing around the Minneapolis sculpture garden. Mostly laughing, actually. I can’t wait for your wedding later this summer.
I have a triangular prism that I bring along to some sessions. Sometimes it works, sometimes it is just a bizarre distraction. For Caity + Adam’s engagement session, we walked around to a lot of beautiful spaces, but this particular shot is not at one of them. The bottom of the scene would have been a strip of parked cars and street (you can see some of them through the reflection). The prism mirroring effect makes it all about Caity + Adam – framing them in trees. Not the right tool for every location, but portraits with a prism can be the a good weapon in the fight against the ordinary.
