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!
Shutter Force Photography Blog 