Wedding and Engagement Shoot

We thought it would be fun to show you a sample of an engagement shoot and wedding coverage of the same San Francisco City Hall couple. This gives you a chance to follow it from beginning to end, including the whole package we offer. There are many advantages to booking us to capture both your engagement portrait session and your wedding. Some of these reasons can be seen by clicking this link to our engagement session gallery page. To provide you more specific reasons I have put together a list below So you can read it right here. These aren't no particular order but are all equally important for various reasons.

• Engagement shoots helps build rapport with City Hall couple
• It is a great chance to learn more about the type of style the couple wants
• An opportunity to practice posing together for the camera
• Discover the couple's preferences for photography
• Chance for the photographer to learn more about how to effectively photograph the couple

In our past experience we have learned that it really does help with the wedding photography to have already spent some time with the couple doing pictures. More importantly, it provides the couple with some great pictures of themselves wearing more casual clothes and in a more natural environment. When engaged couples ask me how they should dress for a Portrait session I always tell them to wear what they usually wear on an everyday basis. My feeling is that this will make them feel more like themselves and also more comfortable in front of the camera. For years, wedding photographers provided all kinds of specific advice on what couples should wear and how they should match. They would talk about various colors that should be avoided and often recommend more earthy tones for outdoor photography. Some of these suggestions are still valid but these days I prefer to let the couples wear what they want.

San Francisco City Hall Wedding Picture Samples

I thought I would show the Wedding pictures first so the viewer could really see the contrast between both the engagement and wedding photography sessions. We brought Sarah up close to the window to use the beautiful Natural Northern light that comes in late at San Francisco City Hall. We posed this beautiful bride to give her wedding gown lots of movement and to accentuate her figure. The background is dark due to the time of evening. Most of the San Francisco city hall wedding photographers that I know love this time of the evening for pictures.

We thought that the evening light would make her gold dress look even more stunning. This is one of the reasons we knew that bringing her to a window with natural light flowing in would be an advantage. The color of this type of light tends to be more gold in color so with our bride's reflective dress it worked out well. The color and texture of this dress really comes out in the photos.

Elegant Couple at SF City Hall

We do so many weddings at San Francisco city hall, it would be easy to just go to each location we prefer and do the same poses and the same lighting. However, this does not serve the client well. In fact, as mentioned above, Sarah's evening style gown worked differently with the backgrounds at San Francisco city hall then a typical white wedding dress. We would have been doing her a disservice if we treated her the same as a white dress bride. So we altered our entire city hall photo tour and looked primarily for natural light to add some beautiful colors to their wedding pictures. In addition, we did our posing slightly differently by doing more with the brides legs in terms of bending them and shaping them. Not as important with a long wedding gown, but vital with a slinky dress like Sarah's. We also use some of the other gold colors present at City Hall to help accentuate the color of her dress.

Engagement Shoot of Same Couple

We thought it would be fun to show you some of the engagement portraits we did of this same couple prior to their San Francisco city hall wedding. In this case, it was only about a week before their City Hall Wedding, but these shoots usually occur many weeks in advance. This provides the couple with plenty of time to use the photos to decorate their wedding celebration. We visited Crissy Field and then took them to Cable Cars by Ghirardelli Square. As you can see below it's a completely different look from the same couple. This is one of the things that makes it so much fun to do both. It will definitely provide them with many different variations that they can use when they print photos for their wedding.