Wedding Photographers Epic Selfie Engagement Shoot

On Christmas Day 2018, we got engaged ourselves! Wooop!!!

We had a lovely little picnic breakfast down near Coolum Beach on the Sunshine Coast, and I (Isaac) proposed to Amy with a gorgeous ring that we had designed together (so not overly a surprise proposal!).

The next few days, we took a few selfie engagement photos – we had our little Fuji XT-2 camera and nothing else.

So we took photos ranging from the camera balancing on a rock :

To photos of the ring :

To as-far-as-I-can-reach-and-just-hope-for-the-best reverse camera selfies :

Which gave us an idea ….

We had an upcoming trip booked to the South Island – a rare 2 weekend break with no weddings meant we booked some flights and a hire car, and figured we’d make the most of a window of opportunity for a summer getaway that’s all too unusual in the wedding photography world!

So we thought – why not make this our engagement session?
We armed ourselves with the tripod, the Fuji XT-2 but also our Canon camera, and plenty of self assurance – like – how hard could it be??

Turns out – plenty hard!
There are definitely many, MANY more outtakes than winners. But through a bit of perseverance, lots of light chasing, some epic locations, and some freezing temperatures – we had a great time.

Here’s a few of our favourite images 🙂

ENGAGED. QUEENSTOWN. MANAPOURI. TEKAPO. MILFORD SOUND. PUNAKAIKI.

A few of the things we learned :

* The Fuji XT-2 has an interval timer shooting mode for timelapse photography, which is perfect for taking self portraits! We can set the interval to a photo every 3 seconds – and then just change up the pose / where we’re looking / etc without needing to continually run back to the camera.
The Canon doesn’t have this feature – so for shots like the star photo in Tekapo, (where we needed the Canon for the ultra wide lens) we needed to set the 10 second timer & then get into position, hold for 30 seconds, and fire the flash manually near the end of the exposure. It was a fairly technical procedure, especially when it’s freezing cold and your fingers are numb!

* So much of the epic South Island scenery really benefits from the depth and compression from a zoom lens. Especially the hills and mountains in the distance, shooting wide angle just doesn’t do them justice… but you need the width to really capture the feel of the scene.
The alternative is something like the shot below – a panorama stitched from about 70 individual shots on the 70-200mm. It’s the best of both worlds – compression from the zoom but wide field of view. Only downside is 70-100 frames to make up one photo.

What do you think of our photos?? We’re pretty stoked with them! Leave us a message in the comments box below 🙂
Same thing if you have any tips / techniques for self portraits that you’d like to share – leave them in the comment box under this post.

Until next time xxx
Isaac + Amy