I am hoping to get engagement photos taken next month, and I have no friends that are close enough to giggle and obsess over details like this. Because I would like giggles and obsessing, I thought it would be good to get feedback and input from all the lovely people at DDN. My fiance really wants some shots on the beach, and I want to incorporate a book in at least one image...but other than that I'm clueless. I'm swimming in photographers (whose sites are sometimes underwhelming or overwhelming) and trying to think of good locations to get photos done if they don't have a studio or a location you like.

If you HAVE had engagement photos, how did you choose your photographer? Did you choose locations? Did you love your photos? What did you use them for? Did you know exactly what you wanted going in (or not) and did you get it?

If you DIDN'T have engagement photos, why not? Do you wish you could have them? If you were to have engagement shots, what elements would you want in them? What would you not want?

For all you non-married people (whose advice I still value), what kind of engagement photos would you like? Images/stories/input?

We didn't have them because they're not common over here and I find them kinda cheesy. Nine times out of ten you can see on the groom's face that he just doesn't want to be there. But, then I found this guy on Twitter and I love his pictures. stevegerrardphotography.com . . . I'm still happy with my decision not to have them, but his are AWESOME. Some people have used them for their weddin invitations which is a lovely idea. Although I've found it a bit odd that people will have their engagement shots a week before the wedding. Surely you have them when you initially get engaged?

^ I 100% agree about getting engagement photos near the time of engagement, not near the time of the wedding...even though I know some people have a quick dash to the altar and the time isn't that long. However, I want them done this month and the wedding is over a year (probably a year and a half) away. I didn't even know people did them close to the wedding until poking around some of these sites. I was like .

And, ZOMG thanks for that link! The photos are beautiful, and I especially love the photo of the two beers. Cheers! There was also an image a few pages back for "Tim and Carla's Wedding" that had been exposed(?) in such a way that it seemed like there were ribbons of light all around it...it was striking! How fun! I also got engaged in London, so some of the photos were like "OOOH! I was there!" and "OOH, I could see that from the hotel..."

I'm not sure if I would. If I do it would probably not be by a professional. I'd get a friend or family member that's really good at taking pictures (like my mom).

As for getting them right after getting engaged... it would depend on the situation. I am engaged...I don't have a ring and no one knows (his family is a bit crazy...) and he is going to ask me again when he can afford a ring (even a "fake" CZ/Silver one, I really don't care... but I know he wants to get me a "real" one). So... getting photos now would be silly.

we didn't have them either as they arent common over here too but we had our lovely weding pics when we got married and i love them. sometimes on your big day it goes by in a flash and photo's are a great reminder so if you want to have them then have them.....enjoy it and treasure them.

We had Them done - they were actually included as a part of our wedding photography package, so our photographer was the same that we had for our wedding. Our photographer said she likes doing them as a no pressure rehearsal for the wedding day as well as a "get to know you" so we were all comfortable with each other by the time the big day came around. We got to choose our location, though our photographer also had some ideas of some of her favorite locations around the area. We ended up going with a beach area that was across from some nice parkland with big pine trees and some terrace shops, so we had a nice variety of shots that were also very different to our wedding shots which were mostly done in manicured gardens. For us it was definitely worth doing as we got to see ourselves in our photographer's work which gave us ideas for what sort of shots we wanted in our wedding day (and what sorts of shots did and didn't suit us). It was all very relaxed and not really posed sort of stuff too, which prepared us for the wedding because it's really the candid shots rather than posed ones that make up most of the wedding photos (and it was nice to confirm that that was the style of phtotography we expected and wanted). We also had the photos from our engagement shoot made up into a guest signing book for our wedding day.

Despite having photographed over 200 weddings and 300 Jewish Bar/Bat Mitzvah events, it is curious that I only did less that a half dozen engagement photos. (I left the business years ago BTW), I suppose if I were doing it today, I would do this with a view to making "Save the Date" invitations which have become popular since I stopped doing this in 1992. I have a nephew who had some engagement photos done with their dogs and he and his then-fiancee used those for their "save the date" cards. (They have now been married 4 years and all the photos we still get from them have the dogs in them.)

We did have a studio in this area run by the late Monte Zucker...he was a trend setter in wedding photography in the 60's through the 90's and just about the most expensive photographer in this area. He had a national reputation and ran many seminars to train photographers, including me. He had something called "Your Love Story" which essentially were engagement pictures. They were usually rather casual and often done in parks in the area, and this being Washington, DC sometimes in or around nationally important buildings...the Capitol, White House (obviously no inside there), the monuments. He had a staff of 3-4 people and they would make this a half-day or day-long event and would include a "gourmet picnic" [his term] with catered box lunches and champaigne from a high end caterer.

Needless to say, his clientale was not one interested in budget weddings...in fact he rather strived to be "The Most Expensive Photographer in America" and I knew of few who could rival him in that claim.

The few that I did (and I was far more likely to do an outdoor sitting with my Bar and Bat Mitzvah clients which was more of a family thing) were usually done in local parks, particularly one noted for it's formal gardens. True beaches are a bit far from here, 150 miles, on the Atlantic...and a beach is actually a rather difficult subject to use as a backdrop...water is very flat, and blue! Sand gets in cameras so my enthusiasm for this would have been limited.

I've only done this once...for a Naval Academy wedding in Annapolis, MD, but some local photographers, both for weddings and engagements went to this town (and others) noted for it's harbor with a few historic sailing ships and used that as a prop, particularly if the couple had any maritime connection. Of course Naval Academy grad had this as did the residents of that city.

I've used the changing seasons as a theme, not just for engagements but for general portraiture. In spring we have cherry and other blossoms here, we normally have rather vibrant fall colors. We don't usually have reliable snow to do a winter scape, but other areas certainly have this. If you have some area which makes it clear where you are...Palms in Florida or California, an historical setting, a skyline that is unique (NYC, Chicago for example) they are possibilities.

Jon

We've talked about getting them done, but only if one of our friends does them for either free or very little. (We do have friends who are professional photographers) What most photographers charge is absolutely insane. So, unless they're cheap or free, we're not getting them done. We have more practical things to spend our money on.

If we do end up doing them, they will be ballet themed. Dance brought us together, so they'd be dance themed.

We did them and they are some of my FAVORITE pictures of us. We have a friend who did them for about $300, but we got the CD so we could go print everything on our own and one dvd that was put to music with our pictures. We used the pictures for our "save the date" invitations. While some people don't think they are "practical", it was one of the best investments we made because the pictures we took are in framed pictures and collages all over our house and incorporated with our wedding photos. My husband and I would agree they are one of the best things we spent our money on while planning the wedding.

We trusted our photographer to do all the shots she thought would look good. We did them at her house, so we don't have anything crazy creative for locations, but they really captured us and our love. We also spent A LOT of money on our wedding pictures because we both like pictures around the house of memories and we wanted to look at them for the next decades loving them. We cut back in other areas for the wedding so that our wedding pictures were really good. We never regretted our decision, but again pictures are important to us and not to others.

Engagement photos are huge around here. I see a few sets every few weeks on facebook. Although I love the idea, I think that they are starting to get totally redundant. ALL of them are either trees in the background or railroad tracks, none I have seen have blown me away as creative.

I love the idea of marking the occasion, but I wish that couples would do something more interesting and more origional to let their personalities shine through.

J and I plan on getting engagement photos done (when that day comes) we have several friends who are pro photographers and willing to do it for a small fee. However we plan on doing our on the painball feild and at the shooting range, much more us.

I found a local photographer whose galleries both fiance and I liked. Surprisingly, she's pretty affordable as well: 2 hour shoot at any location, any number of outfit changes, and copyright to all of the images for under $250. I figure if these shots turn out well, then we'll get her to be our wedding photographer.

HollieErin: I do agree...especially with the railroad tracks. TBH, those make me so uncomfortable...I KNOW that there isn't a train about to smash them off the tracks, but I still have a sense of "LOOK OUT GUYS, YOU BE ON THE RAILTRACKS". Further, we don't spend lots of time out in the fields, despite our rural hometowns, so sitting in the tall wheat grass doesn't seem all that fitting.

I'm thinking of finding/selecting books to use as props, because I'm a big reader. If I could find a book title that fits our relationship, it would be cute to have us both reading it. I'm sure fiance will want to do something computer-based. I hope we can do some outdoors and some indoors, although I'm not sure where a good indoor session could happen. Maybe a library would accommodate us? I'll keep researching.

imadanseur: I'm glad you brought up that your engagement photos are some of your favorites. Boy and I make fun of ourselves all the time...even though we've been together for years, we don't have all that many photos of us, together. It's one of the reasons I feel strongly about getting photos done...we have so few together, and half of them look myspacey because it's one of us holding the camera at arms length.

If you DIDN'T have engagement photos, why not? Do you wish you could have them? If you were to have engagement shots, what elements would you want in them? What would you not want?

I am not engaged, but if I ever am, I am definitely not doing engagement photography. Lots of my friends who are married had engagement photos and put the albums on Facebook, and honestly, a lot of them were super cheesy. Engagement pictures are supposed to be fun and cute, but there's definitely a very thin line between cute and cheesy.

If I had to have engagement photography, I would just want some portraits outside in a nice setting. No action shots, not doing anything, just standing or sitting with each other. That might be boring but it wouldn't be tacky.

^I think that at the seminars and professional meetings I attended I saw just about every cheesey shot imaginable. This stuff goes through a lot of fads. Although I was long retired, I was invited by a friend to attend a trade show for studio and wedding photographers 4-5 years ago and there were a whole new set of fads (one made the album look more like "scrapbooking." When I was doing this it somehow became fashionable for many (if not most shots) to be some sort of double exposure with stuff like a photo of the bride superimposed upon the forhead of the groom (and vice versa); or, inside the flame of the "unity" candle (cheesy in itself at times) or inside a wine glass. I was once asked "can you do that shot of the two of us inside the wine glass?" to which I responded "only if you can find a glass big enough to hold the two of you."

I was part of a movement to make wedding coverage more photojournalistic, an actual (if somewhat artistically helped along) representation of what actually went on during the wedding day. I never saw a bride and groom or an engaged couple go swimming in a wine glass.

Jon

Trout wrote:

Lots of my friends who are married had engagement photos and put the albums on Facebook, and honestly, a lot of them were super cheesy. Engagement pictures are supposed to be fun and cute, but there's definitely a very thin line between cute and cheesy.

Surprisingly this is one of the things that I'm not worried about at all. We are absolutely a cheesy couple at heart, and because the photos are for us I won't give a flying foo if our friends think they are too cheesy or tacky. I'll be sure to make sure I'M happy with them and that fiance is happy with them...but other people just don't matter so much on this one.

Jon: I had never heard of the "two people in the unity flame" or "in the wine glass" before. Woah, funny!

Here is a little secret...engagement photos aren't for other people to really enjoy. They are for YOU and your partner to own and love. They are a reminder of your joy and love of being a couple BEFORE you were married. We didn't have a lot of great pictures of us either that I'd feel comfortable displaying in our entryway where every person that walked in the house could see them. They are professional pictures that look really good and we get tons of compliments on them.

I know you found a photographer but I just wanted to share mine! www.martmari-photography.co.uk . . .

They take really great photos. They're based in the UK and work as a duo for the engagement photos and for the wedding. So far I haven't gotten the cheese factor from any of their photos. I just get all excited and giddy!

Have fun with your engagement photos! Who cares if people say they're cheesey! I think it's adorable

I'm miss giggles and obsessing over here

Are you still in Pittsburgh? My brother and sister-in-law used Randi Voss, but there are so many beautiful places in Pitt to take photos (they did all over CMU, Mellon Institute, and down by the museums, I think) that if that's the type of photo you're into, it should be gorgeous. I can PM you some of the things they did if you want.

We didn't have engagement photos done. It just never really came up. I think my mom asked several months in if we were going to have them done but neither of use were too interested. It's not that we had anything against having them done, it just wasn't for us. Both of us don't really like posing for pictures much. We do love spontaneous photos though! We had a friend do our wedding pictures and she was amazing at getting those types of shots.

If I could have any type of engagement photos done, it would've been during the actual proposal. I don't know if that actually counts lol but those are my favorite! That wasn't an option for us though since I proposed to him and it was completely spontaneous.

I know I'm a little late to be weighing in on this, but I haven't really had time to reply until now...

We didn't do them. We got engaged in November, so outdoor shots were pretty much out of the question, and the couple of indoor places we were interested in didn't allow professional photography. So we put it on the back burner until the weather warmed up. Shortly after the weather started really getting nice this year, we found out that Mark's dad had cancer, and it just didn't seem like the right thing to be doing, frolicking around in a park having our pictures taken while his dad was dying. His dad's funeral was at the end of May, and since then we've picked back up with wedding planning, but with the wedding taking place in September, it just seems silly to have engagement photos done so close to the wedding. Hence, no photos for us.

But we were always on the fence about them anyway. We wanted to do them primarily because we wanted to have a chance to work with our photographers before the wedding so that we'd be more comfortable on our actual wedding day. The photos themselves were never really that appealing to us. We're extremely private, shy people when it comes to our relationship, so the thought of holding hands, kissing, etc, in front of a camera was very uncomfortable for us, and the thought of doing weird, staged things like slow dancing in the middle of a street (something I actually witnessed a couple doing for an engagement shoot once) or leaning against a wall looking in opposite directions while holding hands was also really unappealing. I also feel that 99% of engagement photos turn out looking like very nicely done print ads, and that's just not us at all. So what we ended up doing was just scheduling a meeting to sit down face-to-face with our photographers and explain to them what we want and don't want for our wedding photos and just to get to know them, and let them get to know us a little bit.

But obviously all of this is just my opinion, and it sounds like you really do like the idea of engagement photos, so I definitely think you should go for it if it's in your budget. If we HAD done them, it would have been either at the beautiful grounds of our city's art museum or just walking the streets of our city. We REALLY, REALLY wanted to do them at the Children's Museum, but that was one of the places that wouldn't allow indoor photography. If we could have done the photos there, we definitely would have, because we could have just walked around and interacted normally and gotten some great shots out of it.

We did engagement portraits. We had a close friend who was a photographer. He stopped by one Saturday morning about 6 months before the wedding and said he wanted to do an engagement portrait as his gift to us. I didn't have time to do more than change my clothes and brush my hair, but they came out surprisingly well. Our mothers were delighted and promptly ran engagement announcements in the Boston and Washington, DC newspapers.

Chaconne wrote:

We did have a studio in this area run by the late Monte Zucker ...he rather strived to be "The Most Expensive Photographer in America" and I knew of few who could rival him in that claim.Jon

Chaconne, your reference to Monte brought back memories. My late mother-in-law pushed us really hard to use Monte for our wedding in Chevy Chase, DC. That's who everybody used, but his style was not what we wanted at all. We used a Washington Post freelance photojournalist. This was perfect for us, as we wanted mostly candids of our friends having fun at our reception and we wanted almost no posed portraits. We were very happy with the results.

As already mentioned, engagement photos aren't a common thing in the UK. That said, we did have them...

Our photographer included an 'engagement' photo shoot in the wedding package - the idea was that we got used to being in front of the camera and trying out poses etc. She did have a studio at her house to do a portrait style shoot but she recommended that instead we have the photos done at our venue, which we did. Our venue was a stately home/hotel with lovely grounds, so it meant we could walk around with our photographer and show her where we would like to have photos done on the day. We had the shoot in the Winter and our wedding was in the Summer, so we have some lovely photos of us at the venue all wrapped up for the cold weather so they are quite different from our wedding photos

We did two separate engagement shoots. One was just after we got engaged, the other was about six months after that (we had a 13-month engagement). The reason we had two is because the first one I got very cheaply from a weddings expo so we thought we'd test out the photographer. We liked the photos but we didn't really like the photographer much. So when we were investigating wedding photographers, we had an engagement shoot with the photographer who was at the top of our list to do the wedding shoot. We figured it would let us know if they were right for us. We loved the photos, loved the photographers (they were a husband and wife couple) and they used the same locations for the engagement shoot as they ended up using for the wedding shoot. Was definitely worth it for the peace of mind.

Helen

I definitely will do engagement pictures when the time comes. I just want nice, professional looking portraits really...I know I will have wedding photos, but I want some nice shots of the future hubby and I together when we aren't in floofy white dress and tux, ya know?

That being said, I will totally do some cheesy (though not wine glass hahahaha!) slash quirky shots just because I am a total ham for the camera thanks to my dance experiences haha.

Hey, guys.

My fiancé and I had our engagement photoshoot tonight and it was very fun. The photographer we found is nice, energetic, and she brought her husband to help with the equipment and he was a great addition to the evening. We spent like 2 hours walking around our town's little downtown and it was really fun. We get to see two shots in a few days and then she'll have all of them to us in a few weeks.

It was fun and zany and we have some cliche shots and some cheesy shots and some silly shots that we ended up doing because we felt silly and zany. I hope they turn out well, and I trust the photographer well enough. We think that if they turn out well, we'll try to have her be our wedding photographer--not just because the photos turn out nicely but because our personalities mixed will together without any clashes or weird tense bits.

I'm so excited to see them!!