Gone are the days of the Central Park hand-in-hand engagement shot. In are underwater dances, paintball sessions and zombies (yes, zombies) that — somehow — denote a couple’s love.
As weddings become more and more ultrapersonalized affairs, brides and grooms are staking their quest for individuality — starting with their engagement photo shoots. These days, wedding photographers often include engagement photos in their packages, which start at about $4,000. And the portraits are used for everything from save-the-dates and wedding announcements to good old-fashioned Facebook bragging.
“People are really infusing their personalities into every aspect of the wedding,” says the Knot’s deputy editor Kristen Maxwell Cooper.
“We’ve really seen this in the past few years, especially with Instagram. Couples are looking to make an impact with their engagement photos. People are really having fun with this.”
Here we take a look at six couples who said “I do” to creative snaps.
Spooky kind of love
For this fantasy-loving couple, nothing says true love like zombie hunting.
“We really like ‘The Walking Dead,’” says Matt Riedel, 40, a software engineer. “We like that apocalyptic idea.”
So their wedding photographers, a husband-and-wife team, recommended incorporating zombies into their engagement shoot. To re-create the vibe of their favorite TV show, Danielle, 33, and Matt headed to a private garden in their hometown of Phoenixville, Pa. And their camera team rallied pals to pose as the undead.
“On the property they had this wonderfully abandoned home, and they let us shoot there,” says Matt.
“My parents weren’t crazy about there being actual firearms in it,” says Danielle. “But they mostly loved it.”
The couple married last June at an old steel mill. No zombies were present.
Steamy summer swim
Why bother with clothes when you have a bikini, swimming trunks and Lake George at your disposal? Melissa Wirths and Patrick Brennan, both 26, wanted to make sure their engagement shoot this summer truly represented them. They picked a favorite upstate camping spot of the bride’s, who works for her family’s insurance company, as the location. As for the attire, Wirths decided to go minimal.
“We love swimming,” she says. Plus, “The day we were shooting was really hot!”
So were the pics.
While the father of the bride was totally fine with the photos, Wirths admits her “mom was a little hesitant about some of the ones where I was fully in a bikini.”
The couple used a photo of Brennan throwing his bikini-clad fiancée off his shoulders for their save-the-date cards.
“People who don’t know us might sexualize the pictures because we’re in bathing suits, but our families see us in bathing suits all the time!” says Wirths. “We’re lake people.”
Getting hitched with Hitchcock
“We love everything vintage: old horror movies, big-band music, everything old-fashioned,” says Jennifer Piwowarski. “When we mentioned to our photographer that we love Alfred Hitchock movies, he got sparkly in the eye and said, ‘What do you think about doing that?’ ”
Jennifer, a 29-year-old stay-at-home mother, and her now-hubby were game.
After all, they “were looking for someone who wasn’t the typical ‘blur around the edges in a leaf pile’ type of photographer,” she explains.
“There’s definitely a romantic aspect to Hitchcock’s films,” says Jennifer.
The couple, who took the shots in October 2009 and married in 2010, kept with the unique-pics trend all the way to their wedding day.
“We got married at the Old Dutch Church in Sleepy Hollow, NY, of Headless Horseman fame,” says Jennifer.
“A lot of our photos were taken in the graveyard,” she says. “It was super, super awesome.”
Chowing down in Chinatown
Cyndi Ramirez went on a strict diet to look extra lithe before her engagement shoot last week with 29-year-old fiancé Adam Fulton. But that didn’t stop her from indulging in one of their props: takeout lo mein.
“We just popped into a random place and asked them for lo mein and put them in cartons!” says Ramirez, 30, who lives in the West Village with Fulton. “We’ve had great memories of going to Chinatown on dates, so we wanted to bring that unglamorous side of New York and maybe glamorize it a little bit with our style.”
They incorporated their car, because that was where Fulton had proposed months earlier.
Ramirez explains: “We wanted to tell the story of our relationship through pictures.”
Making bedroom eyes
Noelia Solange Rabino, 29, knew her fiancé Antonio Mañueco, a tech entrepreneur, would be bored with a typical engagement shoot.
“My fiancé hates weddings and all these corny photo shoots. He’s not a picture guy,” says Rabino, who works for a marketing and promotional-product company in Miami. “If I tell him to take a picture with me, he’s like, ‘Ugh, babe, really?’ He’s not someone who would enjoy a three-hour photo shoot on a hot Miami day.”
So instead, Rabino, who is getting married next April, brought the shoot home this past June . . . into their bed, to be exact.
“We have a picture of him playing video games in bed . . . me listening to vinyl records . . . everything’s on the bed,” she says.
The couple, who used five of the photos for their save-the-dates, chose the “most conservative” shots for their family members.
“We have open-minded parents,” says Rabino, “but I’m from a conservative family in Argentina.”
Just call her Marty McBride
Alec Wells, a 30-year-old TV writer, proposed to his actress girlfriend Katherine Canipe in October 2013 while dressed as Michael Myers from “Halloween” — “It’s my favorite movie,” says Canipe, 30. So it was only fitting that the engagement photo session be based off of Wells’ favorite flick: “Back to the Future.”
Last month, the California-based couple dropped $500 on clothes and extra equipment, and spent hours prepping for the wonderfully kitschy shot, which was taken at their photographer’s studio in downtown Los Angeles.
“We decided to re-create the movie poster. But we needed to figure out how to draw attention to the ring,” Canipe says.
The couple say they plan to use the photo on the invites for their November wedding — and that their friends and family would expect no less from them.
“We try to have fun all the time,” says Canipe. “Every day we try to make something magical. That’s just who we are.”