Engagement Photos

We had an engagement photo session today. About a week after we got engaged, I was browsing around on Craigslist (the Louisville site is MUCH smaller and less active than the Philly one, but it's gotten more active over the last couple years) and noticed an ad for a photographer willing to provide free engagement and wedding photography. He said he was just getting into the business and needed to beef up his portfolio, so in exchange for signing a model release, he would do an engagement session and give us the digital images on CD for free. If we want him to print any images for us, he'll charge us for them, or we can take our files somewhere else. Good deal, right?

Well, I haven't seen the pictures yet, but after that experience, I'm glad we didn't pay any money for the photo session. He was a nice guy and all, but he's definitely a novice when it comes to directing models and suggesting poses or actions. We met at Cherokee Park, and it started off badly when he couldn't suggest a good place to park and start the session. At one point, we were driving about a quarter-mile behind him as he sort of looked out the window to see if any of the landscapes struck his fancy. I was a little surprised, because he told me he and his wife had their engagement photos taken at Cherokee Park, so I thought he would have been a little more familiar with the location, or maybe would have scouted it out ahead of time. He was also very vague when it came to suggesting what we do. "Um, I'm just trying to remember what we did at our engagement session." I would have thought that to prepare for a new experience (we're his first engagement photos), he might have looked over his own photos for inspiration. I guess not. So there was a lot of us standing around, sort of with our arms around each other, sort of looking at each other and trying not to crack up, and a lot of wondering what we were supposed to be doing.

But, I don't mean to be mean. He was a nice guy, and I've seen some of his other photos and they're pretty good, so there's still hope. He just needed to be a little more in-charge of the session. And he said he had wanted his wife to be present to help with posing, and she couldn't come. Oh well. I'll post photos when we get them, assuming any of them turn out well (and that would be the fault of the goofy-looking models, not the photographer :)