Shutter Force Photography Blog

The Engagement session is one of the best activities couples can undertake on your journey to the wedding day. The obvious benefit is taking great photos together that can be used for Save-the-Date announcements, invitations, wedding websites and to share on social media and with family and friends. However, there is one massive benefit to having a pre-wedding photography session with your wedding photographers that you might not have thought about. You get to experience what it’s like to work with the photographers you’ve hired, well before your wedding day.

Practice makes perfect, and evaporates stress

During an engagement session, you’re able to learn hands-on how your photographers tick, and how comfortable you feel interacting with them. Basically, you get to feel them out in action, pre-wedding day! This means that by the time the wedding rolls around, you’ve eliminated an enormous stress factor you might not even have known you had: the worry about your wedding photos. When you have complete confidence that your photographers know what is important to you on your wedding day, you can let. that. stress. go. There are a million and one things that can take up space in your worry box on a wedding day. Getting great photography from your chosen vendor should NOT be one of them. It’s incredibly freeing to leave your engagement session floating on the feeling that you already can’t wait to see them again on your big day!

Take your photographers for a test run

Think about it. Leading up to your wedding, you do cake and caterer tastings. You tour venues. You shop around for your perfect attire, and might even have multiple dress fittings, all in the name of preparation for the big day. Actively engaging in these activities help reduce stress by building your confidence in the vendors you selected. Think of an engagement session as the practical test run for one of your most significant vendors: the photographers!

And here’s a killer secret: the engagement shoot is your photographers’ chance to really get to know you, too. Great photography is a symbiotic relationship, best achieved when there is trust and a connection between the camera artists and subjects. We want to capture your authentic selves. The secret to achieving this is the more time we spend with you, the more we’ll connect, which then results in the most genuine, happy photographs!

Awesome Engagement Session Takeaways

What you’ll learn about your photography vendor from your engagement session:

Professionalism: You can see how they adeptly work with their cameras, and seamlessly integrate off-camera flash to ensure perfect exposures. And you can learn what kind of gear they’re using to create the images you love.
Personality & connection: This matters so much! See how they set you at ease throughout the experience and help get you even more excited for your wedding? No need to worry about stressing on the wedding day, they’ve got your back and have the skills to set your focus back on the moment.
Delivering an experience: You’ll see how they make you feel in front of the camera, guiding you into poses without feeling awkward. Great photographers will make it easy to relax and be comfortable in your own skin. You might be surprised how much you were able to let loose and actually have good time!
Fantastic photos: The awesome end result to share far and wide, or near and dear.

When we arrive on a wedding day and are welcomed not simply as vendors, but embraced as old friends…
that’s the power of engagement session bonding at work.
And there’s nothing better than that hug!
-Meagan Brogan, Shutter Force Photography

Taking Engagements to the Next Level

Want to kick things up a notch? Consider doing an adventure engagement session with your photographers. We’ll share more about our Adventure Sessions in a future post, but the basics are: you get to spend even more time with your photographers, bonding while exploring an epic location. More adventures, please!

Adventure Engagement Sessions (like this Milky Way session) allow for greater exploration, bonding and of course, even more epic photos!

Hey, get blogging!

We’ve been told time and time again that we’re a little late arriving to the blog party with our wedding photography company. But then again, we’ve always done things a little differently. We needed a little extra oomph before jumping into the deep end!

We know some of you out there might be hopping onto the blog to learn a little bit about us, maybe find some inspiration for planning your own wedding, but truly, we know you’re here for the photos. And we’re okay with that. 😉 It’s why we’re here, too.

We’ll try to use our blog to share our stories, our style, our joys and our insights, but we absolutely promise to share photos. They might be a mix of weddings, travel, landscapes, animals, and more weddings, but that’s precisely who we are! About that…

Aloha! We’re Meagan and James Brogan and we love to take pictures. Of all kinds of subjects. All over the world. We’re New Mexico wedding photographers based in the Albuquerque area, but we’ve lived in, traveled to and photographed many exotic places around the world. We would primarily describe ourselves as destination wedding photographers because so many of our couples plan their weddings in spectacular destination locations. We are always chasing sunsets and beautiful light, but much of what we do involves making something lovely with what we’re given. That’s part of the challenge and excitement of the art of photography, and why we gravitate toward weddings the way we do. Every wedding day is different, and every wedding plan rarely goes precisely to plan. The wedding day is an evolution, a ride along a timeline that ebbs and flows and is subject to change and littered with the unexpected. That’s what makes them so fun! Both of us are extremely flexible by nature, and we weather the unexpected well. Our style favors bold and bright colors, but we mix in a lot of black and white processing when we feel it’s the best way to present a powerful image. We’re definitely documentary-style wedding photographers with an emphasis on capturing genuine, un-posed moments and interactions on the wedding day. We seek to tell a story, create a feel, capture an essence of a couple and their narrative. We want our clients to feel like we see the real them, and so we strive to build relationships with each person we work with to be the best at capturing them naturally behind the lens.

Weddings are a lifetime adventure, compartmentalized into a single day. We believe there’s magic in that, and it’s our job to find it and capture it to commemorate for the generations to come.

We’re looking for incredible couples who want to see their wedding differently. People who are seeking to create a day that encapsulates their wants, needs, joys, dreams, and personalities. A wedding day can be many things to many people, but for our couples, it’s the best party they’ve ever thrown, surrounded by their favorite friends and family. It’s a day that always goes by too fast. It’s our job to help slow the day down so it can be fully experienced, and when our clients view and share their photos, we want them to remember the way they felt in each moment. Memories of the taste of the cake will fade, the colors of the tableclothes will blur, but it only takes the photograph of a perfect moment to instantly feel the exalted joy of that first kiss, the exhilaration of the grand entrance, the intimacy of the first dance. Glistening tears, the face of a belly laugh, genuine reactions of that first look – these are the moments we live to photograph. Sharing them with our clients means giving them a time-machine, a vehicle to transport them back to a special day, complete with all the feelings and emotions that came with it.

Happy to be sharing our work with all of you. Enjoy!

M & J