Workshop: Engagement Poses

As I mentioned earlier this week, I attended a 3 day intensive wedding photography workshop last week through Boston University's Center for Digital Imaging Arts.  The first day, the whole group shot 6 models at The Commander's Mansion in Watertown.  It was a beautiful old building and I learned so much about window lighting and using lighting to your advantage to produce more dramatic portraiture.  I have about 40 pictures from Day 1 that I want to blog, but I'll start off with these few.  At the end of the day, we took about a half hour to go over techniques for engagement sessions.  These are a couple of those shots.  I will say that this was my first time shooting in a group atmosphere, and it's pretty challenging because you want to get some great shots but you also don't want to step in front of anyone or hog the model's attention, so when shooting with 12 people it was hard to get exactly what I was going for.  But I am fairly happy with some of these "engagement" shots so I'll post a few! This first couple was the only couple we photographed all week that weren't models, although clearly they might as well have been.  Steve and Hilary were a beautiful couple, so happy and sweet and in love, and everyone was thrilled to get to photograph them.  They were married last year, and because of a horrible hard drive failure, their photographer LOST ALL THEIR WEDDING IMAGES.  Every.single.one.  Honestly, that is not only every bride's worst nightmare, it is also every photographer's worst nightmare.  I mean Molly literally got nauceous just thinking about it.  Luckily, Steve and Hilary somehow got hooked up with the workshop, and so they were able to have 12 photographers take some wedding and engagement pictures for them.  Wait til you see how gorgeous Hilary looks in her wedding dress... and Steve was looking pretty dapper himself!

We worked a lot with these two models on the first day too.  Ashley and Zach were not a couple but they definitely could have passed for one!  They were great to work with and hopefully that shows in some of these...