What to Expect :: Meeting with us

If you follow us on social media, you will probably her us mention a lot of “new couple meetings” this time of year. This is the height of wedding booking season in the DC area, and it seems this time of year many couples are making big plans for their weddings. They’ve set a date, secured their venue, and now it’s time to find the best photographer for their big day. Sometimes couples meet us at bridal shows, sometimes they find us online, and many times we are referred to couples by our previous wedding couples. Either way, when we hear from an interested couple we always like to invite them to our little “nest” for a chance to get to know each other. Our studio was created as a place where we could work during the week, but also to be a comfortable place to sit and chat with our couples. Today, we wanted to share a look into what our “new couple meetings” look like!

When a couple inquires with us, it’s almost always by email. Immediately we respond with every bit of information possible. From the get go, we provide our full price guide and several full galleries of recent weddings for interested couples to review. Planning a wedding is tough enough without having to pry necessary information out of wedding vendors. Our preference has always been to be open books, offering up all useful information right away to any couple who is interested in working with us. If we were planning a wedding, we would want pricing information, and examples of full wedding galleries available to us right away, and so that’s how we approach this portion of our client experience. What that means for us, is when couples schedule appointments to talk with us at our studio, they already know our style of photography matches their preference, and our pricing is within their budget.

We like to schedule about a 2 hour window of time into our schedule for these meetings. Now… don’t let that scare you! They don’t all last 2 hours, but when we start talking with really awesome couples, something clicks and we end up chatting for a while! We never want anyone to feel rushed, so we make ourselves available for longer than what is usually necessary. Couples join us at our table that’s usually covered in fresh baked cookies from the local bakery, just across the street from our studio. We all grab a mug, fill it with coffee, hot tea or hot chocolate, and relax. There’s nothing on the agenda, no sales speeches we give, no album sales or anything like that. This is our time to get to know these couples on a personal level. Usually, we just start talking about where they’re from, what they do, and how they met. Eventually, the conversation turns to how they fell in love folding laundry together in their college dorm, or how he proposed at sunrise on the beach and almost dropped the ring into the sand. We get to see how she reaches for his hand, or how he smiles in her direction when she doesn’t notice. We get to learn who these people are, and we get to see what their love is like.

Of course, we talk about the wedding too! What plans they have, who is in their bridal party, what they want the day to feel like, and how they want their guests to experience it. Sometimes we’ll talk about the difficult parts of planning a wedding too, and we’ll offer up any suggestions we can to help. We’ll talk about our time as wedding photographers, explaining our process through stories of the almost 100 weddings in our past. Albums eventually make their way to the table, and couples have a chance to look through heirloom albums that showcase the printed beauty of photos.

Soon enough, after feeling like we’ve gotten to know more than just the standard small talk details of the couple in front of us, we make sure to answer all of their specific questions about our process, pricing, and everything in between. Couples leave these meetings feeling confident that whatever decision they make will be the right one. And we feel like when we accept a commission from couples, we can do so knowing exactly what they want out of their wedding photography experience, and we trust that we can provide that to them.

Our 2016 Calendar is fully booked. Our 2017 calendar is now accepting wedding dates, and we’ve reached our halfway point in availability. Right now, half of our dates are secured, with the other 50% remaining open. We’ve never been more grateful for the chance to do this work we love so much, and we have all of our couples to thank for that! As we move into summer, dates will continue to be secured and our availability will be far more limited. Please, reach out to us now if you are considering working with us. We can only keep you informed on our availability if we hear from you! Don’t wait to get together with us, very often we meet with couples before their date is secured, which gives couples more opportunities to choose dates that work well for their venue and photographer of choice.

Happy planning!