Couple photographer at the Jardin du Luxembourg

One hour starts at €399 and two hours at €599 on digital, and the rate is the same at the Luxembourg as anywhere else in Paris. That covers the planning, the location guide, the outfit guide, the session itself and a private online gallery of individually edited high-resolution images. Film is added on top. A proposal is its own thing and starts at €599. Weddings are quoted individually, from €3,499, and are handled on the wedding page rather than this one. Every combination is laid out on the pricing page.

The first hour after the gates open, which is somewhere between half past seven and quarter past eight depending on the season. The alleys and the fountain are at their quietest then and the chairs are still free. Late afternoon works well too, particularly on the calmer southern side. The thing to plan around is that the garden closes at dusk, so a December session happens in the afternoon rather than the evening.

Not if we time it, and the garden is large enough to absorb a lot of people. The crowd gathers around the pond and the chairs from late morning, but the southern alleys and the area around the Médicis fountain stay calm for most of the day. Right after opening you will often have entire alleys to yourselves. The route is built around which parts fill up first.

My favourites: the Médicis fountain and its long shaded basin under the plane trees, the grand bassin with the palace behind it and the green chairs around it, the quiet tree-lined alleys on the southern side, and the steps up towards the palace. A single session covers all of them on foot, and the guide tells you what each is like at the hour we would go.

We photograph. Rain and overcast skies suit the Luxembourg: the garden empties out, the light goes soft and even, and the gravel and the water go silver. The one limitation is that a garden has no cover, so if the forecast is genuinely heavy the recap gives you the alternative, which here is the streets towards Saint-Sulpice a few minutes away. We only move a session for weather that makes photographing impossible.

Yes, and the Médicis fountain is one of my favourite spots in Paris for it: enclosed by trees on three sides, genuinely quiet right after the gates open, and with somewhere to sit down immediately afterwards. I stay out of sight until the moment, photograph it as it happens, then step in and we carry on with a full session. The planning is on the proposal photographer page.

Yes, and the Luxembourg is one of the places people ask for most once they are engaged. It usually happens somewhere in the months between the yes and the wedding, a stretch of time when almost everything the two of you do together is a decision about the wedding. This is the part that is not. It also feels like an ordinary Parisian morning rather than a landmark, which is what a lot of couples want once the wedding planning has taken over everything else. The engagement session page covers how they work, including for the many couples whose wedding is happening nowhere near Paris.

The wedding day itself is a different job with a great deal more behind it, and it lives on its own page: wedding photographer in Paris. Elopements too. What this page is for is everything either side of that day. An engagement session in the months before it, and a couple session in the garden after it, whether that is the morning after, the honeymoon, or the two of you back in Paris for an anniversary years later.

A couple session, and it is one of the nicest reasons to do one. Some couples want the same frames they took on their wedding trip and some deliberately want nothing like them. The fountain and the chairs have not changed in a very long time, so repeating a photograph is straightforward, and the seasons do the rest if you would rather it looked new. Tell me which when you book and I will build the route for it.

Plenty of couples do, either the morning after the wedding or on a trip back years later. It is still a couple session, so nothing changes about the booking. One thing is specific here: it is gravel throughout, which is unkind to a thin heel, and the garden closes at dusk, so a winter session in a dress needs an earlier start than people expect. All of it goes in the recap the day before, and the outfit guide covers the rest.

One hour covers the fountain and the pond, or the pond and the southern alleys, and it is what most couples book. Two hours walks the whole garden without hurrying and leaves time to go out through the gates into the streets towards Saint-Sulpice, which gives you a completely different set of photographs in the same session.

You get an outfit guide before the session, as a PDF, covering colour, fabric, layers and shoes, and what changes with the season you are travelling in. Here the gravel is the practical thing and the famous green chairs are the aesthetic one, since almost every couple ends up sitting in a pair of them. Send me photographs of the options and I will tell you which one I would rather photograph.

The digital gallery arrives within a week, usually while you are still travelling. If you have added film, it is developed and scanned here in Paris and follows about a week after that. Everything is individually edited by me and delivered in a private online gallery you can share with family, at full resolution, with prints ordered straight from it.

Yes, and French. Most of the couples I photograph don't live in France, so the whole thing is built for people arriving from somewhere else, down to the meeting points and the timings. You have my phone number from the moment you book and you are welcome to use it, whether the question is about the session or about what to do with the two hours after it.