There is a moment that happens at almost every engagement session.
It usually comes within the first ten minutes.
The couple has arrived dressed nicely, perhaps a little more carefully than they normally would for a walk through the park or an afternoon downtown. They have chosen a location that means something to them. They have talked about what they want from the photographs. They may even have spent days looking through other engagement sessions online, wondering how everyone else seems to know exactly what to do with their hands.
Then the camera comes out.
Suddenly, one person becomes acutely aware of their posture.
The other wonders whether they are smiling too much.
Someone asks, “What should we do?”
And then comes the sentence I hear more than almost anything else:
“We’re really awkward in photos.”
I’ve heard variations of it from couples who are outgoing, quiet, athletic, artistic, shy, confident, young, old, newly engaged, and already married in every way except legally.
And after photographing hundreds of people, I’ve come to believe something important:
Most people aren’t uncomfortable in front of a camera. They’re uncomfortable with the idea of performing for one.
That’s a very different problem.
My job as a journalistic engagement photographer isn’t to turn you into professional models. It isn’t to manufacture perfect smiles or position your hands into a series of complicated poses. It’s certainly not to spend an hour telling you to “act natural” while standing perfectly still under my direction.
My job is to create enough space for you to forget about the camera.
The best photographs often happen in that space.
They happen when you laugh at something your partner says. When you fix their collar without thinking. When you walk a little too fast and the person beside you has to catch up. When you stop to look through a bookstore window. When the wind blows someone’s hair across their face. When you are halfway through a sentence and forget that someone is photographing it.
Those moments don’t need to be invented.
They’re already yours.
The trick is learning how to let them happen while a photographer is nearby.
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