Weddingbee Blog

You know how they say you should pick your wedding priorities at the beginning of the planning stage and then always refer back to them when you’re making decisions or arguing with pushy parents? Well, Mr. Panther and I did that, but I already forgot what they were. Whooooops. I’m pretty sure mine were venue, photography and apparel. Mr. Panther’s might have been venue, music and photography. Photography was definitely on both our lists, whatever the other items were.

From the beginning, the two of us agreed on what we didn’t like. We didn’t like a lot of posed photos. We didn’t like cheesy soft-focus effects. And we didn’t want to hire any photographer that would ever consider making a photo black and white and colorizing one particular item, as that’s not our style.

We argued a bit about what we did like, but the general consensus was vivid colors and candid shots.

I did a lot of online research and met with some really talented people. (We didn’t end up going with Carla Ten Eyck or Eric Foley, but I highly recommend both of them. They’re crazy-awesome!) We did a lot of deliberating, but I had known since my first blog visit that I wanted to work with the incredible Raw Photo Design, and finally, that’s who we ended up with! Here are some of the photos that convinced us:

We also loved that Eric and Amber are a husband-and-wife team with a unique outlook on wedding photography—they want their clients to feel like rock stars. Wanting to be rock stars is one of the many things Mr. Panther and I share, so it was kind of a no-brainer.

We booked Raw Photo in February (yup, before getting engaged), and scheduled our engagement photo session for June. As I mentioned in our “How We Met” story, Mr. Panther and I fell in love while living in Boston. We had to have our photos taken there.

It poured in Boston the day of our shoot, but we sucked it up, bought some colorful umbrellas and braved the storm. Lucky for us, it stopped raining about five minutes in! Woohoo! Want to see some of our favorite shots? OK!

(You may recognize this one from our Save the Dates! You have no idea how long it took us to find a patch of semi-dry/super-green grass. Totally worth it, though!)

(We both lived in the same apartment in this building—though never at the same time! We spent a lot of time there, so we had the get a picture in front of it.)

… That’s more than a few, isn’t it? My bad. It’s just really hard to choose when we love all of them! We had a great time roaming around with Eric, and I also learned a lot from my first time in front of a professional camera (unless you count my horrible high school senior pictures … *shudder*).

1. I need to smile with teeth in more photos. It doesn’t look as candid or bad-ass, but it does much better things for my face in general.
2. I definitely want more contouring and dramatic eye makeup for the wedding. I did my own makeup for the engagement photos and I’m having it professionally done for the wedding, so it’s inevitably going to look much better either way, but I need to avoid the “natural” look. This probably also has to do with the aforementioned “small smile” expression, but I’ve got a bit of moon-face going on in these photos, and it’s not the best look for me. Also, you can’t see my lips in some of them.
3. My hair gets frizzy in rainy weather. Oh, wait—I already knew that. BETTER ANTI-FRIZZ MEASURES MUST BE TAKEN.

How did you ladies pick your photographers? Did you learn any valuable lessons from your engagement session?

(All photos from Raw Photo Design’s Blog)