Another type of wedding photography we love to do in conjunction with our City Hall weddings are engagement portrait sessions. These sessions can be requested separately or easily included in one of our packages. We often do these sessions right here in San Francisco, but are willing to go anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area you prefer. In fact, many of the portraits you see on the page above were done outside of the city. The logic being that since the wedding was going to occur in San Francisco, why not try something different for the engagement pictures.
As you can see from the photos above, our engaged couples mostly prefer to wear casual and fun clothes for these shoots. We allow our couples to dress anyway they want, but wearing clothes that are too formal can restrict some of the posing and locations we take our couples. Please let us know in advance if your plan is to really dress up. We have great locations in San Francisco and beyond to take you no matter how you want to dress. Another option that many of our engaged couples choose is to bring a change of clothes with them. We could start the portrait session with formal wear and then we take a break allowing the couple to change into something more comfortable. The important thing to understand is that we are very accommodating and feel that is it important that you wear the kinds of clothes that define your style and are typical of what you enjoy.
As you may have noticed in the sample engagement photos, many of our clients like to individualize their images to make them their own! Examples of this include wearing team hats or jerseys or fun clothes that they enjoy. We also encourage the use of props for those that want to. One example is to bring wine and wine glasses to emulate a little romantic picnic or similar time together. We have had couples that met on a golf course bring their clubs and still others that met while walking their dogs and so they brought there precious animals with them. There are many ways that you can individualize your engagement portrait shoot and these are just a few examples. We will be happy to work with you before the session to discuss other options and ideas. The more personal you can make your engagement shoot the better you will like the final results!
To encourage our couples to choose to have an engagement portrait session we have decided to offer a new package. It is called our "City Hall PLUS Engagement" Package and it includes 2 days of coverage. One day for your engagement shoot in San Francisco and the other day we cover your SF City Hall wedding. For the affordable price of $995 you receive both! Prices for each of these separately comes to $1,200 so you are saving $200 by purchasing a package! For more details on this package, give us a call or shoot an email our way!
Here is one more great reason to have us do your engagement portrait session. It may be one you have not thought about. The fact is, with most city hall weddings, we are meeting the bride and groom for the first time. Because of this, there is always a little warming up period during the photo shoot. This is not the case if we have already completed your San Francisco engagement session. We always love the fact that when we see our couples at the city hall ceremony, we already have great rapport and a sense of comfort. Even more importantly, we now have experience photographing the couple, so we are able to make adjustments if needed. One example is eye blinking. If during the engagement session, we discover that one of you tends to blink quite a bit during photos, we can take this into account and try to prevent it from happening. There are some tricks we have learned over the years and this would give us an opportunity to employ them. Even more subtle issues that can be discovered during any pre-wedding shoot. As we become more familiar with you there are things we can do to enhance the wedding pictures. Also, there may be a few items that the client wants changed about how we conduct our photo shoot. We recently had a couple that asked us not to keep requesting that they kiss during the photos. They didn't mind having pictures of them kissing, but they preferred that the kisses were more spontaneous. This was excellent feedback and helped us tremendously during the wedding photo shoot. Lessons learned from the engagement portrait session!
We also will take this opportunity to photograph each of you individually if you so desire. For many of our clients, this could be one of the first times that they ever had a professional photographer take photos of them. So it's a great chance to get some nice images not only for you, but for your parents or loved ones. There is no extra charge for these photos, we just include them if you want. As you can see from the photo above, we can also give you examples in Black and White or even Sepia tone! We can do these types of photos in San Francisco or anywhere in Northern California.