Pre-wedding photography — should you?

Pre-wedding engage­ment photo credit: ARJ Photography

I’d like to extend a vir­tual hug to Adam from ARJ Pho­tog­ra­phy this week. He’s helped me out no end as I sit sulk­ing with my bro­ken wrist — first with gor­geous images from Liz and Jon’s pre-wedding pho­to­shoot, and now with a bril­liant guest post.

So while my wrist gets bet­ter, it’s over to Adam with every­thing you need to know about pre-wedding or engage­ment pho­tog­ra­phy ses­sions. Should you? Yes!!!

Engage­ment pho­tog­ra­phy credit: ARJ Photography

“We don’t like hav­ing our pho­tos taken, and we’re not pho­to­genic.”

It’s a strange thing to say to some­one who you’re about to hand over a chunk of your wed­ding bud­get to, specif­i­cally so they’ll take pho­tos of you for a whole day – and one of the most impor­tant, emo­tional and event­ful days of your life at that.

But this is often one of the first things a cou­ple will tell me when we meet to talk about me work­ing with them for their wed­ding day.

Pre-wedding engage­ment photo by ARJ Pho­tog­ra­phy in Manchester

The truth is – most cou­ples have never actu­ally had their photo taken prop­erly, and what they’re refer­ring to is forced smiles, awk­ward poses, dodgy light­ing and arms length self-portraits!

The trou­ble is – how do you change a couple’s view before the big day and get them to trust that they’ll enjoy it and look great?  A pre-wedding engage­ment photo shoot – that’s how!

Pre-wedding engage­ment photo by ARJ Pho­tog­ra­phy in Cheshire

I used to offer engage­ment shoots as an optional extra.  Then I quickly realised that few cou­ples realise they ‘want’ one, but the ones who did go for it absolutely loved it and it made a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence to our rap­port on their wed­ding day. So now it’s included as part of my base pack­age for all my couples.

Why is it so impor­tant?  Well lots of rea­sons, but here are three really big ones…

Three rea­sons to have pre-wedding photography

Please click the link above to read Adam’s top rea­sons for hav­ing engage­ment pho­tog­ra­phy.
Adam is from ARJ Pho­tog­ra­phy and based near Man­ches­ter, on the Cheshire border.