Back Story.... When FI and I first got engaged and started to set a budget for our wedding,we decided one of the things we felt should have a decent chunk of our budget was our photographer and our photography package. I had one girl who is local to my area who's pics I just ABSOLUTELY LOVED and we decided to book her as our photographer for an engagement session. We never could work out a day that we could meet and talk in person, but we did have several email and phone conversations prior to the day of the engagement session. So I felt comfortable with what we had planned and how she would execute it.
So, the day of our engagement session came, and during the entire shoot, she never really directed us. Now, I know that with engagement shoots you want your personalities to show through, but what I'm talking about here is, she would say something like "stand here" and we would and then she would just start shooting us, with no direction after that. So during the shoot, FI and I did feel slightly awkward, and several times throughout the shoot, FI said "should we smile?" because we literally did not know.
Our session was in the beginning of October, and we JUST NOW got our engagement proofs back. 7 Weeks. For engagement photos. When she first told me that it would be that long, I thought to myself, well her photos are awesome, and she must really be taking the time to make these the best for us.
You can imagine my surprise when I went to view our online gallery and out of 200 pictures, MAYBE 20 of them are DECENT. They are just lacking in every sense of the word, you can tell FI and I had absolutely no idea what to do in many of the poses, and there are more serious faces rather than smiling faces which is so not us, and it looks terrible.
The silver lining is, we are having a destination wedding, and the photographer at our destination is part of our wedding package and will not be this photographer. So, we won't have to worry about this on our wedding day which is good... but I'm just in a funk about all this now. FI and our parents have been so sweet and said that they are great, but I just seriously don't see it. Especially for the amount of money we paid her and the time we had to wait for the photos to come back.
Sorry for such a long post, I said all of that to say this, do your homework on your photographers. Meet them prior to having a session with them, so they can get to know you as a couple. And if there is no direction in the shoot, please ask them to tell you what to do! haha
RANT OVER!