Couple photographer at the Louvre & Palais-Royal

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

It depends which of the three you actually want. The Cour Napoléon and the pyramid are only quiet before the museum opens at nine, so if that is the photograph you came for, the session starts early and everything else follows it. The Cour Carrée stays calm most of the day. The Palais-Royal arcades are covered and work at any hour. Tell me which backdrop matters most and I will set the time around it.

No. Everything we photograph is outdoors and open: the Cour Napoléon, the Cour Carrée and the Palais-Royal garden and its arcades. No museum ticket, no queue, and we never go inside, because the photographs worth making here are all in the courtyards.

My favourites: the pyramid and the Cour Napoléon early, before the museum opens; the Cour Carrée, which is enclosed in stone on all four sides and almost always empty; the fountain and lime trees in the Palais-Royal garden; and the long covered arcades of the Galerie de Montpensier and the Galerie de Valois. All four sit within four minutes of each other.

The Cour Napoléon is, from nine onwards, and there is no route around that. Everything else here is the opposite: the Cour Carrée is one of the emptiest grand spaces in central Paris at any hour, and the Palais-Royal garden is where people who work nearby go to get away from the Louvre. The session is built to take the busy one first and spend the rest of the time in the quiet ones.

This is the best rain location in Paris and I will say so plainly. The arcades of the Palais-Royal are fully covered, several hundred metres of them, with stone columns, even light and repeating arches that photograph beautifully. A session here does not need rescheduling for weather. It is also the answer I give couples booked into the Tuileries when the forecast turns, since it is a five-minute walk.

Often, and the garden is one of the two or three spots I recommend most for it in central Paris. It is quiet, enclosed, has benches to sit down on afterwards, and the arcades on both sides give me somewhere to be that is not in your eyeline. 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 Louvre 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 gives you two very different sets of photographs in one hour, monumental and then private, which is unusual. 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 here 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 pyramid has not moved, so repeating a frame is easy, and the Cour Carrée and the arcades look nothing like it if you would rather start again. 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: the pyramid is only worth it before nine, so a dress that takes a while to get into means 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 pyramid and the Cour Carrée, or the garden and the arcades, and it is what most couples book. Two hours covers all four with time to walk between them properly, and it is what I would suggest if the pyramid before nine and the arcades are both on your list, since those are the two ends of the morning.

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 it is all stone and glass, so texture and mid-tones do more work than a strong colour, and the black and white stripes of the Buren columns are a good reason to leave a bold pattern at the hotel. 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.