What To Do with Your Engagement Photos (and a Real-couple Example!)

I love engagement sessions, they’re a wonderful chance to get to know your photographer before your wedding day and work out some of those pre-wedding photo jitters. But so often my couples ask “What do we actually do with those portraits?”

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of printed art and today I’m sharing what my clients Tracy and Paul did with their beautiful engagement portraits.

Designing a gallery wall for Paul and Tracy

Tracy and Paul knew that they wanted to create some art for their home but they weren’t sure what form that would take. Would it include wedding portraits? Photos from their engagement session? Did they want single large photo or a group of smaller ones?

With all these questions in mind, I visited Tracy and Paul at their home in St. Cloud. I love to sit with my couples in their space, so we can talk about how they spend their time and the feeling they want to create with the art in their home. I can see the colors and textures they’re drawn to in their own home decor, and I always bring along samples of my art sizes and frame styles so we can see how those pieces would look in their space.

I know it can be really hard to picture the final result with printed art, so I use this super-cool software program to take photos of my couple’s walls and show them exactly what the final art will look like, to scale on their real walls.

Tracy and Paul had a bit of a dilemma, they know their current house isn’t their forever-home so they were hesitant to create a single large piece of art (since it might not have a perfect place in their next house.) With that in mind we designed a modular gallery wall that will grow and adapt as their life changes.

Tracy and Paul’s home has an eclectic mixture of rustic, earthy textures complimented with more industrial glam elements, and our gallery wall captured both. We designed a set of three framed photos, two in metallic gold frames and a center portrait in one of my frames made of reclaimed barn wood.

If you follow me on Instagram, you know I’m a huge nerd about my love for these barnwood frames. Each one is made by hand by a collective of artists in Louisiana and each one is unique. They have this warm, natural feel that’s truly special and makes photos shine.

For the photos, we chose three pictures with very similar color palettes, all from the tail-end of their engagement session. Even though the frames, and the composition of each portrait is different, the cohesive colors and lighting unifies the gallery in a really intentional way.

I love that Tracy and Paul chose such a creative, personal way to honor these portraits and give them a place in their life!