Based in Wallington, Michael Taramona Productions photographs couples across New Jersey, from engagement sessions a season before the wedding to long-married portraits taken decades after.
Engagement sessions in New Jersey
An engagement session is your warm-up. It is the hour or two before the wedding where the two of you get comfortable being photographed together, and where we figure out how you move, how you laugh, how you stand next to each other when no one is watching. We shoot in places that mean something to you: the park where you had your first walk, the rooftop with the city view, a field upstate in the fall, the block in Hoboken where you live. By the wedding day, the camera no longer feels like a stranger.
Couples portraits and anniversary sessions
You do not need to be engaged to be photographed well. We work with couples at every chapter of a relationship: first anniversaries, ten-year anniversaries, the year you bought the house, the year before kids change the picture forever. The session feels the same as an engagement shoot, just without the wedding waiting at the end of it. A warm hour, a few good locations, and a gallery of images that will hold up for the next twenty years.
The way the session works
You arrive in whatever the two of you actually wear when you are happy together. We walk for a while. We talk. The camera is in my hand the entire time, but the photographs come from the conversation, not from being asked to pose. I will give a little direction when it helps, and step back when it does not. The best frames come from the moments between the directions, the look one of you gives the other when the light catches, the way you fix his collar without thinking about it.
The point is not to look like you are in love for a camera. The point is to show what you already are.
Where we photograph couples
We photograph couples throughout New Jersey: Bergen, Hudson, Essex, Passaic, the Jersey Shore, and the open fields of Hunterdon and Sussex when the foliage turns. We travel into New York City and the Hudson Valley regularly, and into Connecticut and Pennsylvania for the couples who ask. If you have searched for an engagement photographer near you in New Jersey, or for a couples photographer in NJ, NY, CT, or PA, we would love to be considered. Travel beyond fifty miles of Wallington is billed at cost.
Simple, honest pricing
No confusing packages. Engagement and couples sessions are billed at $200 per hour plus tax, with no cap on the number of photos we take, and you receive a gallery of warm, fully edited images delivered digitally within four to six weeks. Most sessions need only an hour or two. Couples booking us for the wedding can fold the engagement session into the same contract on the same hourly basis.
Tell us a little about the two of you and what you are hoping the photographs feel like, and we will answer personally.