Engagement Photos

When I said posting about my wedding might be too detailed for some of you - I meant it. For example: I'm starting our "wedding posts" with this post of our engagement photos (I'm sure I'll actually post about my engagement also). My reasoning is you can't have a wedding without an engagement, right? So, why not start my "wedding posts" with my engagement photos?

My sister did our engagement photos in August over two of our vacation days in Montana. One day we just did some pictures at my parents' cabin and the other day we headed into Glacier National Park. It might seem excessive to have two photo shoots on two days, but not if you know my very untrustworthy smile.

I have a bit of a crazy nerve which gets a little too excited when I smile. It is not always present, but when it is - it's so disappointing. When I was 14 I was photoshopped (at a time when that was new age) out of a family portrait because of my problematic smile. No worries, I was superimposed back into the photograph they purchased, but they took me from the "serious" posed picture and photoshopped that me into the purchased "smiley" posed picture. This is probably hard to follow, but lets just say there is a professional portrait, framed in my parents' home, with every child smiling - EXCEPT ME - thanks to photoshop. I always get asked, "Why aren't you smiling?" "Too cool Robin?" or better yet, "Why were you so mad?". All I can say is,
I - WAS - SMILING!, but my coy/serious face was less scary than my smiling face so one got switched for the other. Anyway, It's just a sad tale - along a line of sad tales - about my untrustworthy, anything-but-photogenic smile. This is how it goes: one side of my nose crawls up my face and the eye on the same side looks like its half winking (in a creepy druggy way). It's not attractive.

But I digress. The day in glacier was slightly ruined by my smile (just an off day for my facial nerves) and the rain which poured on us in buckets as the day progressed. Cody was a star, nothing like the miserable Cody which came registering with me. He smiled, posed, and got wet - all with love in his eyes.

Here are three photos from the cabin day:


These are some of the ones from the day in glacier on the Trail of the Cedars:


After hundreds and hundreds of photos and two days of posed faces and bodies, we were exhausted. On our way to dinner after one of these days, we saw a cute barn which I wanted to use as a backdrop. I made both cars of dinner goers pull over so Cody and I could jump out with my sister and take a picture. Every hungry stomach in those cars was so annoyed with the pit stop. My mother jumped out as well and knocked on the property owner's door for permission. The wind was racing. After no answer, we decided to trespass and quickly took 3 shots. We were on the road to dinner in no time.

Turns out, that fast, "micro photo shoot" was all we needed, as we chose a photo with that old barn background for our invitation (most of the barn was deleted though after cropping and zooming). Here is the winner (we muted the colors so it would match the cream invitation):