It was good to be on the road again last weekend. As always, trips out of Fernie are jammed packed and this was no exception. On the itinerary was Aaron’s (of Sharla and Aaron) bachelor party up in Edmonton, a photographer meet-up, and catching the disappointing Canada-USA game with Laura and Leif over appetizers. We also got a chance to work in two engagement sessions in Calgary for a couple of our upcoming clients this summer.

I had a potential bride ask me the other day about why we include the engagement sessions with all of our wedding commissions, and I thought that there are probably a few other people out there who have had a similar thought at some point.

You might laugh, but the reason has very little to do with the actual photographs! It’s mostly about having a chance to connect with our clients once prior to shooting one of the biggest days of their lives. We believe that it is so important that our clients are comfortable with Duane and I and how we operate when we are shooting. It gives us an opportunity to learn about the day and how our clients envision it unfolding.

Duane and I are often along on wedding days for a lot of hours, so it is so important that you feel comfortable that we are going to be a positive addition to things! If the photographers are a drag it can really bring the whole day down.

Finally, we want our clients to be relaxed about the photography going into things. The last thing that they need to be thinking about it whether the photographers know what they are doing! It’s one thing to see great pictures of other people and hope that we can create something similar again for, and its another thing altogether to have the proof. If we’ve done our job right then they are excited for what we can create and what the experience will be like!

We met Jaryn fairly early on in our business when we covered her brother Jordan’s wedding (Carolyn and Jordan) and we were super excited when she contacted us last fall about her and Steve’s Banff wedding in September.

They have this awesome Great Dane, Lexus, so we decided to head down to the dog park (where there must have been a million people and their dogs enjoying the nice weather.) I’m pretty sure that Jaryn and Steve never stopped laughing the entire time during the session!

It was a lot of fun for Duane and I, because we used the session to break out of some routines that we often fall back on. We spend so much time looking for clean, even light (nothing wrong with that!) and we decided going into things that we were going to experiment with some strong directional sunlight to see what we could come up with. I’m glad that we did – it was a lot of fun to force ourselves to see things a little differently!