Engagement Photos

Me and Lee-Anne had engagement photos done. The entire album is pretty substantial, so we narrowed it down to 17 and I posted them on my Gallery blog. Here's a link: https://gryphonsgallery.blogspot.com/2023/06/engagement-photos.html 

This is not the kind of thing I ever thought about doing. I don't even think I knew what engagement photos were before I was told that we had to book them. Now that I see the finished product, I can recognize them as something I've seen other people post on Facebook. But I just thought of them as pretty couples pics, not considering the effort that had to have been put into making them.

Going through the process of having them done, I also realize that I've definitely seen people having them taken on the Iron Horse Trail and in Victoria Park. We had ours done in a little park near where Lee-Anne's parents live, one that we've walked in a lot. It's a cute spot, but the photos make it look like paradise.

As an aside, Brampton is really good for its network of parks. It also has a huge number of community centres, generally with really good resources. The city doesn't have the best reputation, but in these two categories, it's very strong.

I didn't know how to dress for the occasion. Lee-Anne told me to pick something that wasn't too dark, to avoid something pattern-heavy, and to avoid green because I'd blend into the foliage. I tried to bring a bunch of clothes so that we would have a selection, but she told me I was going overboard. Once we got to Brampton, she wished that I'd brought one of the shirts she'd told me not to take.

So we went shopping and I got four more shirts. Of them, she said I looked best in a dark green plaid. Seemed like it went against all previous guidelines.

We took these a little after we were flooded with wildfire smoke, so I was worried that we would be working through a haze. Thankfully it had mostly cleared up by that point. The photographer said that he had been taking pics in the smoke though. Wonder what that looked like.

The photographer scoped out the place a little before our session, as he'd never been there before. He found the bridge that's in some of the better pics. It's a tiny thing, maybe only eight feet long over a creek, but he used it for all it was worth. We weren't even aware of it when we requested the location.

One of the arguments that people use for the legitimacy of AI generated art, is that when photography was invented many traditional artists opposed the technology because it was able to capture the beauty of nature, which previously could only be done by artists that had committed their lives to the craft. Over time, our legal systems decided that photography could be done in a way that used enough human creativity to be considered art, and now this is relatively unquestioned. The idea is that the outrage, followed by eventual acceptance of AI art as a valid form of human expression is inevitable.

That argument mostly just turns me off of photography, but listening to the person that did our photos and his process, there definitely was an artistry to it.

He gave us a lot of prompts. He told us how to hold hands. For the walking pics he told us to bump into each other intentionally. He had us tickle each other. He told us to tell each other our favourite date stories etc.

This picture was surprisingly uncomfortable to take, but it looks really relaxed.

In this one, she's sitting on the railing of the little wooden bridge. I'm scared of heights, and even though it really was just a slight elevation over a creek, I had to work through some nerves. She was fine though.

This one isn't in my collection of 17. Lee-Anne told him about a bridge she used to walk on with her dad when she was young, and that it had recently been renovated. So we took a detour and checked it out. The photographer felt a creative inspiration. So, because of the improvisational nature of this shoot, I really like it conceptually. I don't feel like it quite bore out in execution.

For some of these shots, he had me lean against the safety rail. Terrifying.

Here's one where she looks like she's just falling into my arms, but this actually took some muscle on my behalf. Not the way I would choose to lift her normally either. Good for visuals but not efficient on a biomechanical level.

And then I just really like this one.