The Planning

We’re so excited to work with you for your engagement session! We find them to be an important part of the wedding process working together. It’s a great chance for us all to get to know each other better. A huge part of why we love what we do is the connections we make with our couples! We also like to have the chance to work together before the wedding day so you’re feeling confident and prepared for photos on your wedding day. We’ll get to know how you two interact, the sort of direction that works best for you, and the style of posing you gravitate toward. 

The first step is selecting the date and location. We purposely do not charge for travel within 2 hours of Boulder so that we can help our couples get out to the destinations that they really want! Colorado is so freaking beautiful and there’s everything from desert plains, high alpine mountains, forests, red rocks, metropolitan, and nearly everything in between. Many locations can be accessed right off of the road, while others could take a hike to get to. We’re down for whatever, and we’ll help you plan all of the logistics to make it happen.  With so much to choose from, we first like to know if you had a vision for how the resultant images will look. This could be a location or a color palette. Time of year also plays into this. Boulder’s foothills are nearly fluorescent green in early June and brown by August. The mountains can be snow capped or not, depending on when and where. Some access roads are even “closed for the winter” into late June! Fall can produce some stunning colors, ranging from neon yellow to brown, also depending on when and where. Part of when you choose to do your session is when you may need your photos by, for instance if you’re using them for invitations or save the date cards. Our editing turnaround time for engagements sessions is usually around 2-3 weeks, depending on our workload. Some people send out save the dates as early as a year out from the wedding, some wait until 6 months out, but it’s totally up to you.

If you don’t know where to get started, check out some of our previous engagement sessions for inspiration. We’ll be happy to provide info on the ones that pique your interest and we can talk about similar options as well as involved logistics. We’ll also look into any necessary permits required. We’re happy to do the legwork and obtain them, any fees will be added on to the final invoice.

We generally plan to work in the 2 hours leading up to sunset. Sunset is a tricky one in Colorado, sometimes because of the mountains we lose our light far before official sunset, but we have an app for that. We will always plan the timing based around when the light is best for our location, that golden hour leading up to sunset. Sunrise sessions are definitely an option, if you’re up for an alpine start, that morning light is definitely worth chasing. Outside of those hours, the light in Colorado can be very harsh and unflattering for photography, so we try to avoid mid-day.

Please let us know if you’d like to incorporate pets (always welcome if the location permits), props, family or anything else, just so we can be prepared.

Wardrobe

Once we’ve got our location and our scheduled time, the next step for you will be wardrobe selection. We’re happy to help! We always first recommend something you feel comfortable in; something that is "you." Often, couples like to start in something that's more on the casual side, and then change into something a little dressier mid way through the shoot. This gives a little variety and has you a little more dressed up for the evening shots. Wearing some different layers is another option to allow some configuration and temperature adjustments.

You certainly don’t need to match, but colors that complement each other are good. Both of your outfits should have the same family of tone and saturation (ie pastels, jewel tones, earth tones). Consider the location’s colors as well. Neutral colors are always a safe bet in Colorado. We recommend avoiding anything with intense patterns, it sometimes creates strange effects in the photos. If you're debating some options, please feel free to send us some photos and we'd be happy to give our input!

This is a good occasion to splurge and buy those outfits you're always wanted. They'll last forever in these photos and give you some nice wardrobe options for rehearsal dinner, engagement parties, or a special night out :)

Some other recommendations, bring a hair brush and scrunchie in case it gets windy. If the shoes you want to shoot in would not be suitable for a bit of hiking, consider bringing another option to get into the scene. Scope your clothes for lint and pet hair ahead of time. If wearing makeup, bring the items you might want to touch up during the shoot. We’ll also make sure you don’t have anything in your pockets, so consider bringing a bag to help keep everything together.

How the session itself will go

Trust us, the hard stuff is behind you! Once we have everything planned for the session, the next step is to do it! When we meet, we’ll chat for a bit and catch up, do a quick debrief just to talk our plan through, and get to walking around. Our method is highly photojournalistic. For much of the shoot, we’re walking, chatting, joking around, and generally having fun out in the beautiful location we decided on. We want it to feel like a date for the two of you. We’ll set you up in different scenes along the way, give you some basic guidance, but allow you two to simply interact, flirt, and have fun together. With the two of us there, we’ll be coaching, talking, and snapping away, getting most of our favorite photos before you even know it happened. We like to keep our sessions fun and moving so you don’t feel micromanaged or ever get smiled out. 

As mentioned, your fur babies welcome by us, just as long as there aren’t any rules against them where we’re working. We do some scenes with your pet in the shot as well as others without them. 

If you have a change of wardrobe, about half way though we’ll have you switch so you can have some variety in your photos. 

We’ll keep our fingers crossed for a ColoRADo sunset and end our session then.

What’s Next?

After your session, we return home and import and backup your photos for safe keeping. We sequentially work though our queue of photos, always making sure each image gets the editing attention it deserves. Turnaround on engagement sessions is usually 2-3 weeks. Once they’re ready, you’ll receive an email with a link to the online gallery as well as a download button to save the images to your computer. The online gallery is an easy way to share with friends and family. You can order professional photo lab prints right from there as well. One thing we’ve been seeing a lot of lately is couples using their engagement photos to create an album, which becomes the guest signing book. We really like that idea! If you need any help with prints or album creation, please let us know!

A couple of months out from the wedding, we’ll be reaching out to check in to see how the timeline is coming together. We’re here for you if you’d like to consult with us about the schedule from a photography perspective!