Having an outdoor adventurous Denver engagement session sounds amazing, right!? Your engagement session should reflect aspects of what you and your fiancé love and enjoy doing together. If you can incorporate some of those things and coordinate with your wedding photographer, you have a recipe for success and awesomeness!
Most likely you and your photographer will be traveling to the chosen locations for your engagement session. Even if you are super familiar with the area, it is always a great idea to have your photographer scout all possible locations ahead of time. Showing up for the first time to hike through a mountain, trees or a lake is adventurous and fun, however knowing ahead of time where the sun will set at what time, as well as placing you both within the best backdrops, can have its advantages.
For Katie and Chad’s engagement photos below, we flew out from San Luis Obispo, California to Denver, Colorado a couple of days before we met up with them. That gave us a day to travel and settle in, and a full day to road trip around the surrounding area making a list of favorite spots! For this I used google maps and created pins at all the locations we thought would photograph well to reference. It was also a great opportunity to take sample portraits at these locations, so we would be able to show these to Katie and Chad the following day to let them in on the process, and get feedback.
The next day we met up with Katie and Chad, showed them our favorite Denver engagement session location choices, while also sprinkling in some of their own! This way we all get to explore together, getting to know each other and having fun in the process. The best advice I can give to anyone, whether a recently engaged couple or another wedding photographer, is to make sure you are comfortable, relaxed and yourself. We are all strangers until we meet and connect, and that all takes time. The better we can be as photographers to make our couples feel comfortable, the more likely they can enjoy this process and focus on each other. Thats when the raw emotion and connection truly comes out.
