Santorini Pre Wedding Photography
What Is a ‘Santorini Pre-Wedding photography,’ and Why Every Couple Should Consider One
Santorini Pre-Wedding Photo Session
What’s a Santorini pre-wedding photography you ask? It’s kind of like what we photographers and our clients refer to as an “engagement session,” except not really…at all. Here in Santorini, us photographers have a pretty standard stable of sessions we offer our clients: engagement, wedding, maybe a day-after session, and that’s that. The engagement session is a great way for our clients to get to know us. It also helps our clients learn to be comfortable in front of the camera. Lastly, it provides us plenty of creative freedom to shoot some beautiful photos for their save-the-date cards, wedding invitations, announcements, and guestbooks. We spend an hour or two hours shooting, the clients bring a few simple props maybe, we make some pretty pictures, and we’re done. The clients are happy, and we’re stoked to have had the time to shoot with them without the pressures of the big day.
Enter the Asian Santorini pre-wedding photography. It’s an engagement session on a beautiful views of Santorini and the best places are in Oia Village,Fira, Firostefany, Megaloxory, and a lot more other fantastic places in Santorini. These couples are wanting wedding photos showing them living the Santorini dream photography and they want someone to document it so they can show it off to their friends back home.
As the name suggests, the pre-wedding takes place before the wedding, just like an engagement session. But unlike an engagement session, the clients often wear their wedding gown and wedding tuxedo in the photos. They want to be seen in their wedding attire, and have no reservations or superstitions, and don’t buy into any traditional worries American couples might have about doing so. These sessions can last anywhere from a four-hour shoot to a multi-day marathon involving rented cars and locations that require Volcano views they also spend money to rent out for the day, wedding dressers, and theatrical makeup! They truly are an experience.
Once the session is over, the couples often head back home and hold a traditional, simple wedding for their parents and families. They then proceed to plaster their pre-wedding photos all over social media for their friends to see! The wedding day is very much for mom and dad, and to the couples, it’s secondary to their pre-wedding. Here in Santorini, the wedding day is the absolute most important thing to our clients, and the engagement session is less important – opposite from our Asian friends.
Why Every Couple Should Consider A Pre-Wedding Photo Session
We had the good fortune of being introduced to pre-weddings a few years ago by chance. We got a call from a couple out of Hong Kong, who wanted to fly to Santorini and have us spend half the day photographing them for their wedding, except there was to be no wedding. We were completely confused at first and tried to understand how they wanted wedding photos, but they weren’t married, nor were they getting married, until the following year. There wasn’t a name for what it was they were doing, but we went along with it and had a great time. Then a light bulb went on a couple years later when we started to notice Asian pre-wedding sessions popping up on social media. We didn’t know it at the time, but we had done an Asian pre-wedding photography in Santorini of our own!
Fast forward to 2015 and Asian pre-weddings but from other countries as well are a huge market in Santorini. We getting e-mails requests from companies out of Beijing and other places for Santorini pre wedding photography. They wanted us to be photographers for clients they were sending to Santorini on pre-wedding adventures.
With all of these unique Santorini settings and props, these photo shoots can be pretty challenging for a photographer. Couple that with the fact the clients often live in China or Hong Kong, and the photographer in Santorini or elsewhere, and you’ve got to be on top of your game.