Our Disney Photo Book!

After we took our photos for the Save the Dates we decided it'd be nice to have them all in one place. Jared saw that they sell books on the Disney PhotoPass site so we started looking at that. It's pretty expensive compared to photo books on Shutterfly and other sites but we liked how the pages in the PhotoPass books could have Disney characters on them! Plus you could use your PhotoPass pictures from the parks! 

The site was really easy to use and we were able to make it look the way we wanted. You could add text and there were a lot of spaces for photos so we also used older pictures from different trips and our favorite places. We really loved the result!

Here's a few pictures of the book!

The cover:

 

The spine:

Inside the cover:

Some of the pages:

We really love our book! It was hard to pick what pages I wanted to post because I like them all. I think we will put our book on display at the reception (with a note that says it's just for looking at). We have silhouettes we got done at Main Street in Disneyland too so I think we might have these next to each other. We like our book so much we'll probably use the website again to put together another book after the wedding!

Disney PhotoPass site:
http://www.disneyphotopass.com/

Engagement Shoot- Beverly Hills Photography

We booked a photographer for the wedding- Beverly Hills Photography!  They were on Disney's recommended vendor list and because they work so much with Disney, they actually have employee badges/passes for Disneyland!  They know the Disney wedding venues so well it made us feel confident they were the right photographers for us!
Lucky for us when we booked them they had a limited time deal where you get a complimentary engagement shoot after booking them for your wedding. We hadn't planned on getting a professional engagement shoot since we were happy with the photos we used for our Save the Dates but we weren't going to turn one down!  I'm really happy we were able to do one because it gave us a chance to get to know our photographer and a chance to see how their photos of us look!
I'm happy to report that we loved having them do our shoot and the pictures they took!  We picked Disneyland as our location for the shoot and although we had only a little more than an hour with them, we got many great photos!
Here are a few of my many favorites!

 

 

 

Save the Dates- Shutterfly

For Save the Dates we really wanted to do something affordable so we searched online for different options.  We looked at invitation sites and a couple of other sites that did Save the Date magnets but they were all a little more than we wanted to spend.  I started looking at Walgreens but there weren't any options on the Walgreens site that I liked.
Then one day at work I had to create an account with Shutterfly for a project I was working on.  Afterwards I started getting emails from Shutterfly every week about current deals or discounts they have.  While getting these emails and looking at the site, I saw that they did Save the Dates.  I looked them over and saw that they had a pretty good selection and when Jared and I looked at them together we found one that we liked a lot.  It was affordable, would let us use 3 of the pictures we took around Disneyland, and there was even a special deal going on that would get us a discount on our order.

The card style we selected had 6 squares on it in which you could insert 3 pictures and then use the others for text.  A lot of my family speaks Spanish so we used the middle text square for the date, another square for the info in English, and the last square for it in Spanish. 

We ordered 50 Save the Dates with envelopes and it only cost around $30.  When we got them in the mail we were pretty happy with the result.  Our only complaint was the packaging it came in.  It wasn't very sturdy and seemed slightly banged up but luckily the cards were fine.

Here is the Save the Date!  (I edited out info to keep some of it private but you get the gist of it!)

Here is the site for Shutterfly's wedding/save the date cards!

http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery/wedding-cards-stationery

DIY Engagement Pictures

Originally Jared and I were not planning to get engagement pictures because we didn't want to do anything unnecessary that would be an extra expense.  After the 7 years we've known each other we have plenty of pictures that we love and are special to us.  We did want some new pictures for our Save the Dates though so we decided that we would try to do them ourselves. We don't know anyone with photography as a hobby so we made plans to have Jared's brother go with us to the Disneyland Resort to take pictures. The day before we went I emptied my little pink digital camera of photos to create as much space for pictures as possible.

The Camera:

We ended up doing one session of pictures in formal dress so the photos wouldn't look too much like our usual vacation pictures and then another session of pictures where we are in casual dress.  We took a lot of pictures because we figured if we took several photos there was bound to be some we liked and sure enough there were!
Here are some of our favorites of the pictures:

Not bad for photos that only cost us the mocha we bought for Jared's brother!

In addition to the pictures we took on my camera, Jared and I also got some taken by the Disney Photopass photographers around Disneyland.  Several of those pictures didn't turn out as great as we'd hoped but on our second day of taking pictures, we had a Disney photographer who was the best I'd ever met at a Disney Park.  He was in front of Sleeping Beauty's castle and he really took his time with the picture, making sure there was noone else in the photo and telling us how to pose.  We never even told him we were engaged or anything but he had us pose as a couple and the photo was our favorite of all the pictures we'd taken!

We really got lucky finding that photographer!  We really love this picture!

We got some great pictures and were able to use a couple for our Save the Dates.  We recently selected a photographer for our wedding and it turns out that they currently include a complimentary engagement shoot but I'm still really glad we took these photos!  They are all very special to us and looked great on our Save the Dates!