Weddingbee Blog

There’s something a little self-indulgent about engagement photos… but I do love to indulge myself! So before Mr. Spaniel and I started looking for a wedding photographer, we scoured Craigslist for someone to do an engagement shoot for us. I found someone who was working on building her weddings and engagement portfolio so she was offering a pretty good deal, and I liked the work I saw on her blog, so we made arrangements to meet. I really don’t remember how or why this fell apart, but we never actually did keep our appointment, so we put the engagement shoot on hold for a few months while I researched wedding photographers.

In the meantime, Mr. Spaniel and I wanted to send picture Save the Dates—okay, I wanted to send picture Save the Dates; I don’t think he knew what Save the Dates were—so we still needed an engagement shoot, with or without the professional photographer. We mentioned it to FMIL Spaniel during Easter brunch on a family trip to Cambria, and she wasted no time, taking pictures of us to my specifications (”we need pictures with our faces closer together!”) that very day. I don’t think I had a stitch of makeup on, and Mr. Spaniel hadn’t even bothered to comb his hair! Still, I’d say they were not too bad.

(personal images taken by FMIL Spaniel)

They did, after all, make for our awesome magnet Save the Dates! I still thought that a professional engagement shoot was important to get us more comfortable in front of the camera (and, let’s face it, to give us beautiful pictures of us when we’re still young and pretty!), so when we finally were ready to book our wedding photographer, we made sure to negotiate a package that included an engagement session. We were looking for a wedding photographer who offered engagement sessions, whose work we loved and who we could afford. We found Meg!

Photos by Meg Perotti

Or, to be more precise, I found this picture of a rain-booted bride on MyWedding.com’s vendor page, found Meg’s prices to be somewhere in the realm that we considered to be reasonable for good photography, contacted her, and eventually negotiated a package that was only three times what I hoped to spend for photography. That’s all. Only three times. (I should point out I still think we got a decent deal on our wedding photography; I just wasn’t really originally prepared to spend this much on it, even though it is exactly what we’d budgeted!)

Anyway, we placed our deposit with Meg back in August, and we’ve finally scheduled the engagement shoot for early January. I had originally wanted to try a September engagement shoot since we did, after all, get engaged in September (so what if it was a year earlier?), but life got in the way. No matter; our engagement shoot will actually take place on our four-year dating anniversary. See? It still ties in! I’ll be giving my hair and makeup people a trial run (which means I should go about hiring them, shouldn’t I?), getting myself dressed up (or down?) and practicing my model moves. Hopefully we won’t look just as goofy as we did in our amateur shoot! We haven’t decided where we’ll have the shoot yet, but I found myself particularly inspired by these images I found on Green Wedding Shoes:

Top left by Sloan Photographers, top right by Jennifer Skog, both bottom by Leigh Miller

I particularly love the shopping cart photo. I feel like a lot of edgy, interesting engagement shoots result in a lot of shots where the couple looks like they don’t even like each other! But these all look like couples who are enjoying being together, and that’s definitely important to me for our pictures. I’m so excited to work with our photographer and get more comfortable in front of the camera before game day.

Did you do an engagement shoot with your wedding photographer? Did it help you relax?