Weddingbee Blog

Mr. Cherry Pie and I had our engagement photos taken in Glacier National Park during our 2007 visit. We had been engaged for about a year already, so the photo shoot was less about commemorating our engagement and more about making a record of our relationship.

I tend to take a lot of pictures and therefore I’m always behind the camera and never in front of it. The end result is that there just aren’t that many photos of us together and where they exist they’re often sweaty pictures taken during or after hiking/running/cycling. Our engagement photos was the only professional photo shoot we’ve had in the eight years we’ve been together.

Having the pictures taken in Glacier meant that we got to test-drive the photographer we were considering for the wedding, Nicole Tavenner of Piknik Studios.

I’m really glad we took the opportunity to work with Nicole, because she left us seriously impressed. First, she went WAY BEYOND the call of duty. We expected to have her for one or two hours and maybe get a handful of good shots out of it. But she was so excited to be in Glacier and we were all having so much fun that she took pictures for over four hours in six locations—and we paid the same price we negotiated beforehand.

Before the photo shoot, Mr. Cherry Pie had been reluctant. He just didn’t see the “need” for e-pics. The funny thing was that partway through it, he had changed his tone completely. He started saying that we should have pro photos taken every year because it was such an intimate and enjoyable experience.

In the end, Nicole sent us over 300 images on CD (per our request for digital versus print). This selection had been narrowed down from a huge pool of photos… WAAAAAY more than we expected her to take and certainly a lot more than we expected to LOVE. Here’s a sampling of a few more:

I can’t speak highly enough of Nicole. Her work is excellent! But we don’t just love her photos, we love that she kept smiles on our faces the whole time, that she came and had dinner with us when she was visiting Seattle, that she took the time to go through all of our photos with us to help us choose the ones WE liked, and that she kept in touch even after our shoot was over and our photos post-processed.

We know she’ll take good care of us at our wedding!

How many of you used your engagement photos as a way of interviewing your wedding photographer?