"Engagement" photoshoot with Derek Wong Photography

Due to downsizing our original event due to COVID/restrictions, Derek graciously allowed us to split our original 6 hour booking into 4 hours for our wedding day and a 2 hour engagement session. We were happy to have this opportunity that we wouldn't have had otherwise. My engagement & wedding planning post has all the history with choosing Derek Wong Photography for our event (if you're interested), but I want this post to be all about the photos! 

Derek had mentioned that we could send him photos of what outfits we were planning to wear, so we did that!

Left set of clothes is actually what we wore for our legal ceremony. My dress is the Liz Lisa off shoulder fishtail dress in white. I didn't love any of the photos we had from that day, so, given the opportunity, I thought it might be good to have a set of photos that I did like in them (even though it's 1.5 years later). Derek recommended khaki pants instead of the slacks, so we changed that out. The right set is more casual and includes the dress I wore on our first date! This dress is also from Liz Lisa - striped peekaboo dress in white from 2015. The shirt and the jeans were new purchases for my husband that we thought had the same vibe as the dress.

No plan for shoes because we were expecting to be on the beach/barefoot for most of it!

This was shot just a few weeks before our wedding event on May 5, 2021 in the Makapuu area. (After revising our booking to be split, we had originally scheduled the "engagement shoot" for early April which would have been slightly better timing-wise but had to postpone due to bad weather on that initial date). It ended up being a bit grey this day and quite windy as well but we're still happy with how it all turned out!

All photos below are credited to/copyright of Derek Wong Photography.

This first set of photos are a selection from the initial 25 preview pictures that Derek had sent to us 5 days after the shoot. We were so excited to see these and love so many from just this small set!

We took the majority of the photos in the first set of clothes because Derek loved how my dress reacted to the wind so there's not as many in the casual set. 

The rest are a selection of my favorites from the complete set of 152 photos. (There's no real reason these are separated except that I was so excited about the preview photos and had started drafting this post with them before I got the full set lol.)

Again, shout out to Derek for being accommodating during COVID and allowing us to make changes to our booking for the wedding. The engagement shoot is definitely worthwhile and I know we will treasure these photos for years to come!