The engagement session serves many purposes, and one of those is the opportunity to get to know your wedding photographer. This is a big deal! I'm going to spend 6-8 hours with you on one of the most important days of your life! So it's important that you feel comfortable around me! And beyond that, doing an engagement session is like a trial run of the entire wedding photography process:

Customer Service - Preparing my couples for the session, responding to emails quickly, delivering final images in the appropriate time.

Posing - Helping my couples loosen up in front of the camera so they can relax and enjoy spending time together. Walking them through posing and giving clear directions for what they should do. Allowing them to be themselves and also pushing them to try something new. (As I tell my couples, no one stands on the sidewalk nuzzling in real life!)

Shooting & Editing Style - Variety in location and cropping. Simple, clean, and colorful editing style. Unless we're confined by the location we choose, I try to deliver a variety of close up and wide angle shots.

Every photographer is different. We all run our businesses differently. We all pose differently. We all shoot and edit differently. And that's not a bad thing! But those can be difficult things to evaluate when a couple is trying to choose a wedding photographer!

Doing an engagement session with your wedding photographer helps you know what to expect throughout the rest of the wedding process. It's the perfect low-pressure way to have complete confidence in your choice of wedding photographer. And that's the most important thing to me! I want my couples to have confidence in my work and know that I will take care of them.

A Facebook post from one of my 2015 brides sums it up well: "During this planning process Mark and I have chosen vendors based on a few things: like-ability, personality, trust, and confidence....We chose people who took our idea and vision and told us what we needed and wanted and how to make it work for the wedding. We didn't have to do the work. They did it for us. They understood that this is our first time planning a wedding and we understood this was their 100th. So I would like to say thank you to all of our vendors - we truly trust you all, know you're the best, and can't wait for you all to make our day magical!

That's why I want to do an engagement session with all my couples. It's so important to build that trust!