Meet Jeannine and Tom.  I met them last week and I think I have a crush on how they are as a couple.  They’re just so great together.  I love in love people!   I know the context of getting a photo taken is a bit strange and stressful, because it involves giving someone permission to really look at you and your significant other, as the case may be.  But when people can get past that and just be seen and just be together I always take it as a gift.

Tom and Jeannnie, thanks for spending some time with me, and I can’t wait for your wedding in Cobden, which is coming right up.

I get such great couples!  Here are Brooks and Kelly.  They are so sweet together and so in love.  I’m looking forward to their wedding in November.

I’m behind on the blog and need to post some sessions from the past couple of weeks.  First up is Ryan and Julie’s engagement session.  We had fun hanging out.  They’re a great couple, and I look forward to their wedding this fall.

I shot Jennifer’s senior pictures a couple of years ago and was delighted when she contacted me about shooting her wedding pictures.  She and Clinton have been dating for five years now, so their story is a very sweet one.   Here are some of my favorites from their engagement session this weekend, trying out a new lens and some different toning.   I look forward to Jennifer’s bridal session and Jennifer and Clinton’s wedding.

It was great to spend some time with Kyle and Christina during their engagement session.  We shot in the natural light studio, out at the park and finished up in the strobe studio for a range of casual to more traditional photos.   Thank you Kyle, for hanging in there!  I look forward to Kyle and Christina’s wedding this November.  It’s going to be fun and the details sound like they’re going to be particularly lovely.

I believe engagement sessions help my bride and groom on their wedding day, which is why I include engagement sessions in all my wedding packages.   I know that especially with couples from further away, an engagement session is not always practical, so I allow couples to trade the engagement session for an extra hour of coverage at their wedding if need be.

I wasn’t always this way.  Three years ago, I pulled engagement sessions from my basic coverage, offering it as an add on only,  namely because I started worrying I was torturing the guys, who oftentimes didn’t consider an engagement session one of their top five ways to spend a Saturday afternoon.   But I got over that, and now see the engagement session as the couple and my first chance to collaborate, to decide where all we’ll go shoot, to interact about photo ideas, what we like, what we don’t like, to get a sense of one another.  It is important to me to be a known person to my clients, so that they trust me and will let me in, so that I know them.

Meanwhile, of course, we get fun pictures at engagement sessions.  I always shoot some traditional ones suitable for the newspaper engagement announcement and digitally submit those for my brides and grooms to papers of their choice, bundled with their engagement announcement.   I also let the bride and groom choose two images for the front and back of double-sided wallet sized cards to put on the tables at the reception.  Some brides and grooms put their mailing address on these, some put their gallery link.   Everyone loves them, and I print 250 of them for free as long as my info on them somewhere.  The images below are a couple of samples.

This blog post is the first of a unified blog project started by my friends on the foundation workshop forum, where each week we plan to blog about the same topic on the same day.

I have just under a jillion photos from Donnie and Nicole’s engagement session and am trying to narrow them down to a reasonable number.  Here are a few favorites as a sneak peak  Such a fun couple!  I can’t look at their pictures without smiling.  And am so looking forward to their wedding.

We had a beautiful day at the park for Chris and Lindsey’s engagement session.  Lindsey and Chris are fun to hang out with and easy to talk to.  They are both teachers.  Lindsey teaches Kindergarten, so I’m always picking her brain for tips on the management of the 5 year old crowd.

Bill and Melissa are a very cool couple and are always fun to visit with.   We did engagement pictures in studio, downtown, then out at a sunflower field.

I’m going to take some images of Jordan with his motorcross gear on at a track he frequents this week.   I took several of Jordan and his bike in his backyard, which is like a portrait park, just lovely.   We picked out a different image than this one with the bike at their ordering session this week, but there’s something about this image I love as well, so I decided to post it here.