Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Wedding Planning Wednesdays - Engagement Photos and the wedding photographer - Virginia Wedding Photographer

It's that time of week again, hard to believe another week has slipped by so quickly. We are just under 8 months left in planning our wedding and at times it feels like we have so much left to do but I think it is important to realize what all has been done so far.

We have our location for the ceremony and reception picked out and reserved. We, well Katie has, bought the wedding dress; she is doing an excellent job hiding that from me as well. We have also picked out two possible cake vendors which we will be meeting with soon. The colors have been chosen, although there is still the question of the hue. I (Josh) never put much thought into how many hues one color, purple, could have. The date has been chosen as well as where we plan on honeymooning. We took a quick getaway to Williamsburg over the weekend where we took our own engagement photos.

This brings up a good question, should you shoot your own engagement photos? Being as we are wedding photographers and I (Josh) learned a lot about about photography by doing self portraits, we figured we would save some money and do our own. There were definitely some pros and cons to going this route. For Pros, we didn't have to pay anyone. We got to do them in one of our favorite places, Williamsburg, Va. We setup the shots that we wanted and I think we got some beautiful shots together. For the cons, that is a little more difficult. When you have a photographer doing them you get to give your full attention to your fiancĂ©, I think I did pretty well dividing my attention and I was still able to get some pretty candid shots since I just held the remote shutter and turned my attention to Katie. 

There were many missed focus shots because, well, there wasn't anyone behind the camera. The biggest thing for me (Josh) though was I took the shots, edited them and did the slideshow so I didn't get the full impact of seeing them for the first time; Katie did get that though so I was very happy with that. So would I do it that way again? Absolutely, but I caution you to not do it unless you have a familiarity of doing self portraits. I think I will still be surprising Katie in the next week but I can't divulge anymore on that since she will see this :) Love you Katie :)

Our wedding photos will not be done by us, it was actually a pretty big process deciding who would do our photos. A few local first choices were booked for our date, one had gotten out of doing weddings and some were out of our price range. In the end I am very happy and thrilled to have Emily Russell oEmily Russell Photography capture our day. Check out her facebook page by clicking on the link
over her name. 

I knew Emily from when I lived in Michigan and through the power of social media reconnected. And being a
photographer we messaged often talking about the business and I even was privileged to assist her on a wedding.

So things are progressing well even though we still have much to do. One thing we have both found that is very important
is that we continue to take time to continue to grow closer together. The weekend getaway helped a lot, especially as work 
is devouring much of our time and everything else. We have also started going to a bible study to grow closer to God as we 
grow closer together. Premarital counseling is also in the works as we both realize that relationships and marriage takes a lot
of work and effort. We know there will be good times as well as bad times and we have both seen and continue to see very 
unhealthy relationships around us. We will be different and we hope to be an inspiration and help to others. 

Marriage is work, there is no easy way. Some people choose to jump from relationship to relationship and quickly run when things
get hard. We have been blessed to not have had any big trials but we know that they will come. Because of that knowledge we know
we must work hard at the foundation so that when the storms come we will make it through. Neither of us take the commitment of 
marriage lightly and we hope to be a light to those around us. Engagement to Katie is my promise to marry her and this is our foundation 
building time. It isn't that we don't want to build the house immediately but we know we want our house built on the rock. So come and walk 
with us. 

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