Couple photographer in Montmartre

One hour starts at €399 and two hours at €599 on digital, and the rate is the same in Montmartre 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.

Sunrise, without hesitation. At first light the lanes around the Sacré-Cœur are empty and the sun is hitting the east-facing steps while the rest of the hill is still in shade. In summer that means meeting around six; in winter Montmartre stays quiet until mid-morning, so the alarm is a great deal kinder. Evening golden hour is beautiful too, but you will be sharing the famous corners with a lot of people.

My favourites: rue de l'Abreuvoir for the lampposts and the pink corner of La Maison Rose, the vines of the Clos Montmartre, the staircases of rue du Mont-Cenis and rue Foyatier, the quiet rue Saint-Rustique, and the view over the whole city from the top. A single session covers all of them on foot, and the guide I send tells you what each one is like at the hour we would go.

From late morning the answer is yes, but only in two places: Place du Tertre and the front steps of the Sacré-Cœur. Everything else stays manageable, and the back streets like rue Saint-Rustique and the stairways of rue du Mont-Cenis are quiet most of the day. At sunrise you will often have the whole hill to yourselves. The route is built around that rather than in spite of it.

It is a hill, so yes, though less than people expect. The route climbs roughly a hundred and thirty metres over the course of the session, taken slowly, with plenty of stops because we are photographing on the way up rather than marching. If stairs are a problem, say so when you book and I will build a version that stays on the flatter streets near the top and starts you there by funicular or taxi.

We photograph anyway, and Montmartre is one of the places it genuinely improves. Wet cobbles throw back the lamplight, the ivy goes dark and saturated, and the hill empties out completely. Overcast light is soft and even, which is the easiest light there is for portraits. The wet-weather version of your session is settled in the recap the day before, so it is a decision already made. If a real storm is forecast, we move the session.

Often, and it is one of the two or three places in Paris I would recommend for it. The hill is full of corners that have a view and nobody in them early in the morning, which is exactly what a proposal needs. I stay out of sight until the moment, photograph it as it happens, then step in and we carry on with a full session. How the whole thing gets planned, including getting someone up a hill at sunrise without it seeming odd, is on the proposal photographer page.

Yes, and Montmartre 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. The stairways and the rooftop views give you two completely different sets of photographs in one morning. 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 Montmartre 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. Both work here, because the hill has enough different corners that we can repeat a photograph deliberately or avoid one entirely. 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 to the hill: it is stairs and cobbles throughout, so a long dress needs someone to think about the route, and it is worth bringing shoes you can climb in and changing at the top. All of it goes in the recap the day before, and the outfit guide covers the rest.

One hour covers the quiet stairways and one of the famous streets, and it is what most couples book. Two hours lets us climb the whole hill from the bottom to the rooftop view without hurrying and take in the vines and the back streets on the way. Montmartre is the one location where I genuinely lean towards two, because the climb itself eats some of the first hour.

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 shoes matter more than anywhere else on my list, because the whole session is cobbles and stairs. Once you have narrowed it down, 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.