A year ago, an engagement session was part of my wedding collections.  Then I started getting more and more wedding inquiries from brides who lived too far away for an engagement session to be doable.  So then the haggling on my collections would start. I LOVE to travel and I wanted to be better able to accommodate my far away brides without compromising my collections.  Now my wedding collections no longer include an engagement session, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have one if possible!

When I say you should have one, I really mean: HAVE AN ENGAGEMENT SESSION WITH THE PHOTOGRAPHER YOU WANT TO DO YOUR WEDDING PHOTOS.

Imagine this scenario: You’ve found a photographer online and you love their images.  Great.  They are even within your budget.  Awesome.  Then it’s your wedding day and you discover you and the photographer get along like oil and vinegar.  (In other words, you don’t).  You don’t like any of their ideas or their approach to getting the shot.  They are rude to your mom or ignore what you want.  Or you all are just not a good personality match.  Or maybe you all get along, but you don’t really understand each other and you’re too shy in front of them to do some of their poses.

What if you had done your engagement session with them and found out ahead of time that you are not compatible?  You could have found a wedding photographer that is better suited to your personality.

Or you may have hit it off with the first photographer and gotten the chance to know them so that when your wedding day rolled around, your photographer felt like someone who belonged there, and not an intruder with a camera.   An engagement session provides an amazing opportunity for you and the photographer to get to know each other.  This benefits the both of you and I promise you will love your photos that much more when taken by a photographer you found common ground with before the wedding!