Scroll down for London pre-wedding shoots, Brighton engagement photos, Los Angeles portrait sessions, and so on (or check our portfolio)… And if you don’t think you’re the sort of people who want a a pre-wedding shoot, don’t worry: almost everyone thinks that at first, especially over in the UK.

Pretty much no one thinks they’re good in front of the camera, us included. But engagement shoots/pre-wedding shoots/portrait shoots/whatever you’d like to call them are very good practice for the wedding day, entirely painless, and often involve coffee/cake/gin (and gin generally makes most things better). Plus, you end up with some photos of yourselves looking casually gorgeous, which is always good.

The best part, though, is that you get over your photography fear in the first five minutes of your pre-wedding shoot… and can you'll feel much more confident about your wedding day.

caitlin & evan, engaged at the griffith observatory

"When should we schedule london pre-wedding shoots?"

Some couples don't actually fancy an engagement portrait session at all, but instead we get together for their LA/London pre-wedding shoots a day or two before the wedding but dressed in their nuptial finery. It's like a really early first look, and it's a GENIUS way to get pictures in your wedding dress/fanciest suit without all the drama of the wedding day (can you tell we thoroughly recommend it?)

If you'd like to spend some real time on your wedding portraits or want to venture somewhere that's not so local (desert shoot, anyone?) trying to cram it into the middle of your wedding day is never fun for anyone, so setting aside and hour or two on another day entirely is a really great idea.

This is everyone's first question to us. There's no one answer: it depends on what you'd like the pictures to be. For some couples, it's a "we just got engaged and we want a picture to use in our save-the-date stationery!" thing, in which case we should probably get cracking.

But for lots of our clients, there's no particular goal. The engagement shoot is just a handy practice run for the wedding: you get to hang out with us and our cameras and see how easy and not weird it'll be. If you're at all anxious about being photographed, a pre-wedding practice will settle your nerves.

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LONDON PRE-WEDDING shootS portfolio