How to Capture the Perfect Proposal, Cape May New Jersey
- Jan 30
- 4 min read
I honestly do not know why it's the case, but I get contacted quite often for proposal photography, and I don't know what I'm doing, whether it be website-based, SEO magic, or something else, but These are some of the more stressful photo shoots and not something that I particularly seek, yet they always seem to end up in my lap. The purpose of this blog entry is in no way to whine or complain about getting too many proposal photo shoots. In fact it's the opposite. I intend for this video to be an educational resource for other photographers, looking to capture proposals well if not better than they currently do, and also want to share this video with perspective clients of mine, who may be interested in hiring me to capture their proposal. Over the past couple of years, I've refined a technique and also have learned quite a bit as to what preliminary measures were really well in both alleviating stress and just ensuring that the vision of my client gets captured to the fullest in the best way, with photography being something that elevates the day and doesn't encumber it.
Obviously, If you haven't proposed or photographed a proposal, it's a bit nerve-wracking, and if nothing else very exciting. With the purpose of this post being primarily educational, I'm gonna do my best to keep things both concise and informative. I'm gonna do my best to cover the key points of conversation and strategies discussed with all my clients that I'm confident are good starts to ensuring, 1. the surprise isn't spoiled, 2. to the vision as the client sees it is captured, and 3. the photos are delivered to the best of my ability at the highest quality possible.
So 1st and foremost, it's important to express the need for your client to take things slow. It's going to be a uniquely stressful and exciting event in their life. So it's important that they go through the process slowly, that the 2 of you establish a queue or a marker, a gesture, something of that sort, that will signal they are about to drop to the knee and ask the question, this will help ensure that you are in the right place at the right time.
If the client takes things slowly, it affords you as the photographer more time to adjust and react to perhaps a changing environment. This could be anything from the client missing their mark, and you just need to relocate so that way you get a better angle of the face and the reaction. Or a slight breeze that blows the hair in front of the face and just having a couple more moments to squeeze off some photos is the difference between getting the reaction unobstructed or completely missing it entirely. Okay, so yeah, it's common sense that the slower your client takes it the more that they'll be able to soak in the experience. Additionally, you'll be able to snap more shots if in the position as a photographer, hopefully, allowing time to adjust to any particular obstacles that might come your way.
It's important, obviously, yes, to make sure there is a vision that's established, or at least a plan that's established, on how you're going to capture it, such as where your client's going to be entering the location from, where you'll be positioned at. And the last piece of common sense advice that I want to put out here is that it's very important to establish when and how to communicate with your client. It should be done 1st and foremost, really, earlier on, the better. You want to make sure that you're contacting them at the right time of day on the right days, of course, and also just buy the correct means of communication, whether it be phone call, email, or text.
It goes without saying that you don't want to be the reason, the surprise is spoiled. And all it takes to avoid that is a little bit of upfront communication and planning. In closing, some of the best advice that I can give to save both yourself and your client stress is as the photographer showed 30 minutes ahead of time, at least, if the job is farther away, closer to an hour, no less than 45 minutes. You'll want to be stuck in traffic. If you show up early, if nothing else, you're prepared to capture the moment given that your clients arrive sooner than expected. If you're just hanging out, so be it. You can use the time to capture some establishing shots of the scenery, or any sort of scene set up that the client has put together to commemorate the event.
I would also highly recommend using a tracking app on your phones so that way you can communicate your locations without having to talk to each other about it. For instance, if you're both using iPhones, check out the Find My Friends app. You're using Google, um, or Android devices. Obviously, Google Maps works well. Cross-compatible, devices. I feel like Google Maps is also the way to go there. Make sure that you troubleshoot and test and set up this ahead of time because you don't want to be finding out that there's some sort of issue on the day of.
Lastly, as your client is preparing to leave, to meet you at your location, given the opportunities available, have them shoot you a message. For instance, if they're out to dinner. Saying, hey, just paid the bill. We'll be leaving here in about 5 minutes. See soon. Something like that.
To anybody who has made it this far along in the video. First off, thank you. I also have plenty more footage of side-by-side content like this. I look forward to doing something with if this video is helpful in any way, even if only to one person. I'll take that as a huge win. Um, if you're a photographer that got something out of this, I would love to hear what the key points and takeaways were. If you have additional advice, I would love to hear that as well as to how you strategize with your clients. And, yeah. And yeah, that's all there is for this one. Thanks for staying till then.
If you're interested in watching this proposal photoshoot play out in real time as I overlay the images featured in this blog post, along with plenty more, check out the full video available on youtube via the link attached:
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