Weddingbee Blog

Hello again, hive! It’s been over a month since my last post. Things have been busy in the Toadstool household—we’ve had a lot in our hands between driving back home for the holidays, visiting family and settling into a new life together.

But I am back now, with engagement pictures!

We got our e-pics a week after our wedding day. The reason? We took them a mere month before the big day. The way our photographer works is that he gives us the chance to see the raw files, we pick the ones we like, he edits them and gets back to us with prints and hi-res digitals. It is his way of making sure we love the pics we get—and it’s great, but I took my time (procrastinated) to go see the files, so we had to add those days to our waiting time.

The (fairly short) wait was worth it because we have these babies: (Photos by Alberto Alcorta Photography)

We had the shoot in November. I scheduled my make up trial for that day and my sister woke up at 6:00am on her day off school to curl my hair (bless her for not burning my neck with the curling iron).

By noon we were at Alamos, a small colonial town that’s just an hour and a half away from our hometown.

We were lucky to have a fantastic cloudy day (not very common around here), so the lighting was ideal. Alberto knows the small town very well and he often shoots there, so he’s familiar with cute scenes you wouldn’t necessarily notice as a tourist.

Alberto calls this shoot “ice breaker,” because it’s his chance to get to know the couple and learn how to work with them so they’ll feel more comfortable with him on the wedding day, and that definitely helped on the big day.

Even though Mr. Toadstool looked at Alberto’s work before we hired him, I was still a bit on the edge. I picked this photographer and I wanted Mr. Toadstool to love his work, you know? So I was extremely pleased that, when looking at the raw files, Mr. Toadstool expressed that Alberto is worth every cent. Score!

I know a lot of couples have a wedding related reason to take engagement pictures (save the dates, wedding websites, invitations, etc.), but we didn’t. However, I really wanted these photos. Mr. Toadstool is not very good with pictures and we don’t have many “good” pictures of the two of us. And although we’ll have tons of wedding pictures, I wanted a few nice pictures of us that looked more “everyday” and not just wedding pictures. This seemed like the perfect time to do it.

What are/were your reasons to have or not have an engagement shoot?