Today’s post is special, and I don’t want to spoil the moment with lots of words and opinions and comments… so treat this blog feature as you would an inspirational photoshoot in one of the top UK wedding magazines.
Cat Hepple is a hotly tipped UK wedding photographer and regularly features on one of my favorite UK wedding blogs Love My Dress. She took Lizzie and Guy for an early morning stroll around Leeds city center for their engagement photography shoot, and the results are breathtaking.
Lizzie’s love story – a French proposal
Myself and Guy met through my best friend and one of his close friends who were dating at the time and are actually getting married 6 weeks before us. We’d both gone along with each of them for moral support! We clicked straightaway and things went from there!!
Guy proposed to me on the 20th May 2010! We’d arranged to go to France to see my sister as she was living over there at the time! Guy had asked that on the way down to Bordeaux could we stop off in St Nazaire where I was born and my dad is from!
The day we arrived he asked if we could go for a walk and to the park that I had spoken about that I used to love when I was little! We got to the playground area and I said oh look there’s the spiders web climbing frame that I was obsessed with when I was younger!
He said let me take a picture of you in front of it. So I posed and then as he went to take the picture he got down on 1 knee, pulled the ring out and asked me in French would I marry him!! I was speechless and so shocked I hadn’t expected a thing!
He actually thought I was going to say no cause it took a while for it to sink in! But of course I said yes, flung my arms around him and then cried! It was the happiest moment of my life!
He then told me that we were going to Bordeaux but then we were going to New York and staying in the Ritz!! I was gobsmaked to say the least and couldn’t believe he had managed to organize all of it without me having an idea!! And he’d done all that for me!
I just love him! The way he knows exactly what I’m thinking, how he can always make me laugh, his spontaneity and of course his good looks!
Romance shoots by Cat Hepple Photography
I always offer an engagement shoot to my couples as part of my wedding collection. I call them Romance shoots, as these are all about capturing the real feelings between a couple in a really fun and relaxed way.
Lizzie and Guy’s chic city engagement shoot
Lizzie and Guy wanted a really different look to their wedding day, which is at a very grand venue in North Yorkshire later this year. I came up with the idea of a city based shoot and wanted the feel of a couple walking home early in the morning, after being out celebrating their engagement all evening. “The morning after the night before” I called it. The couple loved this idea and decided to dress up, Lizzie in a gorgeous evening dress and Guy in a sharp suit. It looked so cool in the early morning city , the 2 of them dressed up, Guy wrapping his suit jacket over his girl’s shoulders.
They looked fabulous together and we quickly decided to go for a magazine look to the images.
A romantic setting -and how those sizzling shots happened!
The town hall in Leeds is a really beautiful building and provided the perfect setting for some romance. For the most part the skies stayed dry if a little dull but the rain came down in sheets at times, and we ended up dashing into a phone box just to stay dry. I asked the couple to almost kiss, and the resulting images are so powerful. There is nothing forced or pretend about these images, this is just how they react to one another, they are clearly so in love! This is what the romance shoot is all about, finding out how the couple react together and their comfort level in front of the camera. These two were totally at ease!
The romance shoot is a great way to help my couples feel at ease on their wedding day, together we work out what looks good, how to create certain looks and then on the big day they are so much more at ease about being photographed. It’s like magic.
Official wedding photography website: www.cathepplephotography.com
A hugely inspiring and gorgeous wedding photography blog: blog.cathepplephotography.com
