Weddingbee Blog

Professor Paisley and I knew we wanted some artsy-cool engagement photographs, but on our grad-student/freelance-writer budgets, we thought it’d be impossible. Then I learned, on the Weddingbee boards of course, about finding free sessions from photographers just starting out and building their portfolios.

A while back (like a year, haha) we found Ashley Rose and were lucky to snag her LAST free sesh.

We immediately began planning how to style our shoot, including wardrobe, hair accessories, setting, props and perhaps most importantly, gathering inspiration to help us pull off the look we wanted.

We had a total blast:

I had the idea of plastic cups to play telephone after I watched this cool video.

I just sort of stumbled upon the video since I wanted this song played during our processional so I was Googling it left and right, obsessed I was. Our quartet is currently learning the piece… yes!!!

We then *tried* to capture the essence of one of my favorite music videos of ’09, Chasing Pavements by Adele. We had so much fun as we rolled around on the “pavements”:

Ashley was so creative and a totally fun person to hang out with during our session. I love how she was completely down to try all my crazy ideas, including taking a photo of a paper heart cut-out reflected in my eye (inspiration in the first video), and how she waited patiently while I tried about 50 times to prop up my engagement ring (using both double-sided tape, and putty) to take this picture:

Great success!

I love how the ring forms a heart shadow. Special points to anyone who can identify the Spanish novel it’s sitting on. Hint: it’s my favorite book of all time. That’s a SUPER helpful hint for y’all.

Ashley had the scathingly brilliant idea to put us in just the right position to create some pretty rad shadows:

Here are a few of my favorites:

We’re definitely blowing up one of these babies to display at the reception!

Did you have fun styling and planning your engagement photo shoot? Did you find inspiration from any music videos or other media?