Should you take proposal pictures?

People ask wedding photographers all the time to take engagement pictures. In fact, some photographers include it in their wedding package.

Great idea- everyone’s relaxed, you get great pictures, and the photographer and couple get pictures to send to relatives and the local newspaper for wedding announcements.

Engagement photos are also a great way for the photographer and the couple to see how they look photographed so adjustments could be made. For example, if the bride was wearing a lot of heavy eyeliner and it looked bad in the pictures, she knows she’d have to make adjustments with her wedding makeup. Or if the groom is a person who blinks a lot when a flash goes off, the photographer takes notes and knows that they will have to overshoot the groom to make sure there are enough good shots where he’s not blinking at the wedding. A win-win situation for everyone.

So recently I read about a new phenomenon called proposal shots in the New York Times. Generally, what happens is the groom is planning to propose to the bride. He hires a photographer to secretly take pictures of the proposal in the background. According to the article this was great because then the couple would have proposal pictures to send to their friends.

Now, when I heard about this I balked. I thought, jeez, isn’t anything private anymore? And when I asked other photographers and friends about this, there were mixed opinions. What I learned is that if you’re under 30, you love it! You’ve grown up with everything being photodocumented, you have a MySpace page and you make friends on FaceBook. You will definitely post your wedding pictures on a website for friends and family to see and the proposal, the engagement, the wedding, and even the Trash the Dress shots are part of what you’d want captured.

If you’re over 30, it’s a different story. You believe certain moments are personal and privacy is sacred. You would never want your proposal documented. And most likely you feel the same about having all of your pictures available for the whole world to see on a website. You still want an intimate album that captures the spirit of the day. One woman thought “it was kind of stalkerish.”

So what’s your opinion on proposal pictures?