Engagement sessions are a vital part of your wedding experience for so many reasons! Sometimes people don’t understand the purpose of doing an engagement session. So I wanted to take the opportunity to educate you all on why an engagement session is SO important and will actually affect the outcome of your wedding pictures too! Engagement sessions are the exciting first step of your wedding photography experience and there are beneficial is so many ways! Here are a few of those reasons!

Get warmed up to the camera. During an engagement shoot, it normally takes about 20 minutes for the couple to get warmed up to the camera. They’ve probably never had their pictures taken professionally before, so they are usually a little nervous in the beginning and don’t know what to expect. As the session unfolds, they start to feel a little more comfortable and their personalities really start to shine through! They start to understand my posing better and become pros at giving me exactly what I’m looking for! By the end of the session, I’m normally using just little key words when directing them into poses instead of giving them the elaborate directions and instructions on what pose I want. So at the beginning of the session I might say “Now I wanted you to come in close together so that your belly buttons are touching and then bring your foreheads in close together so that they are lightly resting on each other”. But at the end of the session, I can just say “foreheads” and they know exactly what I’m looking for! I also find, that each couple has “their pose”. Every couple is different- different heights, personalities, body shapes, etc. So about 30 minutes into the session after having gone through several different poses, I normally find a pose that is “their pose”. It’s the pose that they fit into perfectly and really reflects their personalities and relationship.

So why is all of this important? On the wedding day, I sometimes don’t even have 20 minutes for the Bride and Groom portraits- which, I might add, are the most important pictures of the day! So by already having done an engagement session, they are already warmed up to my camera and ready to go on the wedding day! I can use my shortcut posing directions and already know “their pose”! This allows us to get the most out of however much time we have for portraits on the wedding day! Here’s some couples that rocked their engagement sessions, so by the time their wedding rolled around, they were pros!








Get to know your photographer. I always say that one of the best ways to ensure an exceptional experience for my clients is by getting to know each other! Your wedding photographer is the one vendor that is by your side throughout the entire wedding day. They’re the one you will share every big moment with and the one you’ll turn to when things go awry and you’re not sure what to do. So it’s important that when I show up on the wedding day, I am showing up as a friend and not just another vendor! So the engagement session serves as a great opportunity for us to get to know each other! Often times this is the only time we’ll see each other in person before the wedding. During your session we can chat about how you met, how he proposed and everything in between! By the end of these sessions, I always leave with two new friends!
Capture this season of life. Being engaged is a very exciting and fast paced season of your life. It doesn’t last long and it’s full of tons of excitement and celebration! You have stepped into a new phase of your relationship with the person that you will spend the rest of your life with! So the engagement session allows you to take a breather and capture this moment in time forever, because before you know it, you’ll be married! Engagement sessions are all about capturing your relationship right in that moment and celebrating your upcoming marriage. You’ll be able to look back at these pictures and see the excitement in your faces and remember how you felt during that season of your life. And that is priceless!
Using your pictures. There are a ton of different ways that you can put your engagement pictures to use. You can use them for an engagement announcement in the newspaper or for your “Save the Date” that you send to your guests. I’ve also seen a lot couples use their engagement pictures to create a guest book for their wedding. You friends and family may also want to use them to print and put on display at bridal showers or engagement parties. Plus, it’s always nice to have professional photos that are just focused on the two of you in your own element being yourselves!

Now that I’ve convinced you to do an engagement session, check out THIS POST for some tips on planning your dream engagement session!