My Wedding In Real Time: Engagement Picture Shoot

So I said I wasn't going to post until Monday, but we got back early and I had SO much fun at our engagement shoot that I just had to share it with all of you. I am SUPER excited and anxious for our photos to get done (or at least a few up on her blog) and as soon as they are I will definitely be posting them or a link here.

We decided on three different outfits for our engagement pictures (well kind of 2 with an alternate shirt) to save time instead of doing a million outfit changes. The first was a jeans/casual outfit. We tried to incorporate some color and fun accessories, so our colors were purple/blue with me wearing gold accessories. I also rented umbrellas from Bella Umbrella, so we incorporated a teal blue umbrella into some of the shots.

Then our second outfit was just a quick change into Duck/Beaver shirts. If you're not from Oregon then you likely don't know that our two main universities (University of Oregon and Oregon State University) are HUGE rivals. And of course, G and I root for different teams...me the ducks of UO and him the beavers of OSU. Our families are the same way...mine all ducks, his all beavers...and we're all die hard in our beliefs there! So we took a few shots with our team shirts and a football to humor our family and friends who know about it. We didn't spend a lot of time doing those, just a quick few minutes.

The final outfit was our formal outfit. I opted for a little black dress, black heels, and black necklace, while he had khakis and a black shirt. Color is always suggested, but anyone who knows me knows I ALWAYS wear black, so this was just more me. This is where we incorporated the majority of umbellas: red, red with black ruffles, mustard yellow, and more. It was so much fun! I am excited to see how it all turns out.

The one thing I want to tell everyone about (who hasn't taken their engagement photos yet) is that meeting your photographer (for the first time for us) is awkward for about 5 seconds, but a good photographer is always really friendly (and Jamie totally was!). The hardest part for us was when she warned us at the beginning that she just wanted us to be natural and she would only guide if she needed to. G and I are not models and we are not used to taking endless photos (other than a quick snap at events) so we didn't really know what to do. She'd tell us, you can get closer to each other, you can kiss, you can kiss her forehead. At first we felt like fools and I think that forced us to laugh which also made for good shots, but at the same time it didn't take long for us to get more comfortable. G got super excited that we spent a few hours making out (more than he usually gets, as he joked) and I actually started to feel comfortable in front of the camera.

Oh and we must thank God for the change in weather. It rained up until about an hour of our photos and the sun even came out for about 5 minutes in the middle of our shoot. I was told that pictures with overcast weather actually turn out better, so I'm hoping they're right...and I'm hoping that she can magically photoshop out my blue lips at the end of the shoot when it was starting to get pretty chilly. :)

Now the test is, did the pictures turn out ok? I'm hoping that they did, since we ended up taking photos for two hours (almost 30 mins-1 hr more than she had planned) but ya never know. I'm not always known to be photogenic. Let's see if she brought it out of us.

~A

PS: Thanks again to the amazing Jamie Hammond of Jamie Hammond Photography. She was so good with us and we had so much fun. I absolutely can't wait to work with her at the wedding!