Hello fellow brides!
I wanted to do a mini vent about save the dates and also need some advice.
We booked an awesome photographer, but unfortunately after we booked she relocated from California to Florida. She will be flying in for our wedding and still travels back and forth and after many postponements on my end for the included engagement photoshoot we finally had scheduled a date to have them done this past October. With my luck that is RIGHT when the oil spill in California happened causing all the beaches to close and my dream location of the pirate tower in Victoria Beach couldn't happen. They wouldn't even let us on the sand. It was so last minute getting this info, I had to keep calling the city every day to see if they would open with no luck and it was too late for me to find another location for photos. Honestly, I have my heart set on this spot and it's the one thing I wanted. Thankfully our photographer was fine rescheduling, but she won't be in town again until Feb/March or if another wedding pops up before then. I really wanted to use our engagement photos as save the dates for our wedding on 7/3/22 and was hoping to get those sent out sooner than later because it is a holiday weekend and want to make sure people have enough notice.
Everyone is telling me to use photos from our trip in Hawaii when he proposed, but the photographer we had there took super awkward photos of us and all of my bad angles. Most of them are either my side profile or the back of my head (they really are not flattering at all) I miiiiight have one I can use, but we're just standing there staring at the camera prom style. My FH and I don't really have any other good photos we could use. I thought of just taking some ourselves, but this pandemic and the added stress these past couple months have not been good to me and I've been gaining a lot lately and don't feel my best. We could hire another photographer to just take the engagement photos for us, but that's another expense we want to avoid. Also doesn't help we work complete opposite schedules, I work a normal schedule and he's 3pm-3am, so I've been doing like 95% of the wedding planning and the only time we get together is on the weekends, if that.
I'm at the point of just sending save the dates with no photo of us and keep it simple, but am torn because I did want to have a photo of us on there. Any advice/recommendations would be great! I just feel so overwhelmed at this point.