what it's like from start to finish
welcome to the
exclusive client lounge
working with ashley fisher photography
The last step before booking us to capture day one of your marriage is to attend a consultation, either in-person, on the phone, or via google hangout (depending on our availability and the time of year: most of our consultations during wedding season are phone consultations). During this consultation, we really want to get to know the two of you, hear all of your plans to celebrate the beginning of the rest of your life together, and make sure we're the right fit for each other. Just as much as you're searching for the best photographer for your day, we're searching for the right clients for us: those clients who allow us to give them the best version of ourselves and our work.
THE CONSULTATION
book your
consultation
the f.A.Q.
Both First & Last Names
Both Email Addresses
Both Phone Numbers
A Physical Address
Confirmation of Date
Confirmation of Ceremony Venue
Confirmation of Reception Venue
Collection Choice
Collection Add Ons, If Any
Payment Plan Schedule
booking process
here's the information needed to process your contract & retainer
Please note that dates cannot be held without both a signed contract and paid retainer.
To secure your date, we simply need a signed contract and a $1000 retainer! Easy peasy. We do book quickly and we're often meeting with multiple couples for a single date. If you know you want to work with us, be sure to contact us as soon as possible to get the process started, and be sure to sign the contract and submit the retainer as soon as you receive it! Our contract is signed online, and our retainer can be paid either with an ACH transfer or a credit/debit card for no additional fee. On average, we book April/May/June and Sept/Oct/Nov about 12-18 months in advance and the remaining months between 6-12 months in advance.
Hannah is our absolutely amazing studio manager! Anything you need throughout the process can be taken care through her. If at any point you have any questions, need advice, need to schedule something, Hannah is your gal! You can reach her at hello@ashleyfisherphotography.com.
Meet Our Studio Manager | Hannah
the client questionnaire
Once you're all booked, Hannah will send you our initial client questionnaire. Our clients often spend an evening together with a bottle of wine filling this out. This piece of the process is crucial to ensuring that we are able to capture images that reflect the two of you and what is important to you as a couple, as well as make each of you as comfortable as possible during the time we spend photographing you! None of us are naturally comfortable and ourselves in front of the camera, but I can promise you that if you take this piece seriously and simply trust us to do our thing, you will absolutely love your wedding & engagement photos.
SCHEDULING
YOUR ENGAGEMENT SESSION
As soon as you book, we encourage you to go ahead and get your engagement session on the calendar. We have very limited availability, and dates go extremely quickly. We shoot our Save-the-Date Engagement Sessions on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays, 1 hour prior to sunset within 10 miles of 63132. Our Epic Engagement Sessions may be scheduled any day we're available, with a start time of three hours prior to sunset within 150 miles of 63132.
book your epic engagement
book your save-the-date engagement
what to wear &
WHERE TO GO
After you've scheduled your session and filled out your initial questionnaire, we'll finalize exact start time according to sunset and determine our location. You'll have a chance to tell us places that are meaningful to you in your questionnaire. If there's not a specific location you have in mind, you'll simply tell us whether you prefer greenery/park locations or architecture/city locations, and we'll choose the location based on the best light at the time of day in that time of the year. We always prefer light over location, simply because our photos tend to focus on our couple rather than the background. So don't panic if I ask you to stand in a really odd or ugly location. It's probably because I see some incredible light, and light makes the photograph. Our favorite St. Louis locations to shoot are Forest Park, Tower Grove Park, The Central West End, Clayton, SLU, Wash U, Concordia Seminary, and Downtown St. Louis.
Every couple asks us what they should wear to their engagement session, so we actually took some time to create a What to Wear (and what not to wear) guide for our couples. You can get that here:
But the even cooler thing is that our brides can rent a designer dress through us (and our amazing partners at Rent-the-Runway)! This service is complimentary for our Epic sessions and only $39 for our Save-the-Date and Mini sessions, and it includes any dress that is available at the time on our plan!
the guide
What to wear for your engagement session
teasers &
the gallery
I normally post a handful of teasers to our Facebook page the night of the engagement session, as well as post them in your online gallery, where individual downloads will be enabled so that you can share freely, as well as order save-the-dates while you wait on the rest of the gallery. We promise our engagement galleries within 6-8 weeks, although we always try to underpromise and overdeliver. We simply ask for your patience in waiting for your gallery, as we are normally editing anywhere from 4-6 weddings and 5-10 engagement sessions at any given time (along with things like being a parent and making sure our toddler gets fed and bathed)! Our galleries are delivered online, and you'll receive a pin code to download all of the images to your computer. You may share that code if you wish with your friends and family.
planning
assistance
We absolutely love being a resource to our couples while planning their big day! This is why we created our client lounge in the first place, and part of the reason why we brought Hannah on as our studio manager. We understand that this is your first time planning a wedding, and it can definitely get overwhelming. That's why we walk you through how we work on a wedding day in our Best Day Ever Guide and provide lots of resources in our AFP Resource Guides, including our favorite vendors in St. Louis. If you ever need any help or advice with anything wedding related, don't hesitate to reach out to Hannah. If it's something that either of us needs to be involved in, she'll pass it along to us, but usually she can provide an answer quickly for you! She's also available throughout the entire process to help with formulating a timeline for maximum enjoyment of the day (and beautiful images of course)!
our favorite
vendors
the best day ever guide
the wedding questionnaire
This is hands down the most important piece of our working relationship. The wedding questionnaire is very long and detailed, and we use it to formulate our wedding day photography plan. We send it out about two months prior to your wedding, along with a link to schedule your final call. We ask for the final call to be scheduled around 3-6 weeks prior to your wedding day, and we ask for the questionnaire to be completed at least 24 hours prior to your final call to allow us time to review it prior to the call. The questionnaire is where you'll give us all of the nitty gritty details about your day including locations and addresses, important people, the family formals list, your details lists, timeline information, vendor information, your priorities, and any other information that we need to know in order to capture your day accurately and beautifully. Our final call will last about 60-90 minutes, and after the final call, we'll send you a final information sheet that you can distribute to your family, your bridal party, and any vendors who may need it. Please note that if you have a wedding planner, please let us know as soon as you book them, so that we can work on the timeline well before the month prior to the wedding, as we won't have as much flexibility to move things around later on in the process.
click here to book your
final call
wedding day
I have one rule on your wedding day: My couples MUST enjoy their day. This means that they don't worry about the timeline or the little details that might not go exactly to plan, but instead they just focus on the fact that they are surrounded by their best friends and their families and that they're enjoying day one of their marriage. We create a timeline that allows for extra time so that the day is stress-free. This is part of the reason why we look for couples who are flexible in their timeline so that we are able to do this for them! Outside of this one rule, you can read our in-depth approach to how we photograph a wedding day in our Best Day Ever Guide. You might even pick up some great advice over there, too!
the signature
reveal party
The Signature Reveal Party was born because we wanted to see our clients faces when they saw their wedding images and relive the day with them. We put a huge emphasis on our relationship with our couples, and we wanted to do something more for them than simply send a link to a gallery. We wanted it to be an experience. We invite our couples and selected guests (we have comfortable space for our couple plus 4 guests, but a few more are welcome if you want to cuddle up), and we serve hors d'oeuvres or a small meal along with our favorite wine and beer. We start the party by showing our couples a 15-20 minute slideshow of our favorite images from their day (and they get to keep that slideshow and share it with their friends and family). It's so much fun to see our couples laugh and cry at the many incredible moments from their wedding day. While that satisfied our need for instantaneous feedback, there was a bigger reason we started our reveal parties: we noticed that our clients were becoming a part of the missing generation and that we were failing both our clients and their future children and grandchildren by not ensuring that our clients were printing their images.
We've mentioned it before, but we like to underpromise and overdeliver. We promise our clients their wedding images within 8-12 weeks, but we try to schedule their reveal parties within 6-8 weeks of their wedding. Reveal parties are held on Sundays and last around 2 hours.
This is the link used to schedule your reveal party. However, please do not schedule your reveal party until Hannah emails you with date options that fit in our post-production schedule.
schedule
your reveal party
wedding
albums & wall art
The second piece of our Signature Reveal Party is helping our clients in the process of creating their wedding album to pass down to future generations and wall art to hang on the walls of their home. We were married in 2011, and we still don't have our wedding album or anything printed from our wedding day. We really did value it and have great intentions, but life got in the way, and quite frankly, a wedding album, wall art, and prints are expensive and don't seem valuable until after you lose someone in those images. Additionally, we just didn't even know where to start. The process seemed so daunting that we just put it on the backburner. We didn't want that to happen to our couples, so we decided to take the best of both worlds approach. You still receive your digital files with a print release, but we do everything in our power to make your first family heirlooms attainable. That means that we help you out by creating the initial design of your wedding album so that you have a starting point and can simply switch out images in a way that still tells the story of your day. It also means that we offer HUGE discounts at our reveal party for one night only, but we only require a $250 deposit on your album and a $250 deposit on your wall art, and we work out a payment plan for up to 12 months interest free! We really believe in the value of the tangible, and we want to make it easy on our couples to have it if they value it and want it, too.
clients for life
We want to be a part of our clients lives and be there to celebrate the next milestone, whether that's a new baby or our signature anniversary session! Genuine friendship and trust is the key to beautiful images. If you made it this far and you would love for us to be a part of day one of your marriage, we'd be incredibly honored to document it for you.
