Couple photographer in Parc Monceau

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

A weekday morning, soon after the park opens, without hesitation. That is when the alleys are quietest and the light is still coming in low under the trees. It fills up with families, joggers and people on their lunch break by the middle of the day, and weekends are the busiest of all. An early weekday start gives you the garden more or less to yourselves, and nothing else about the timing here is complicated.

Rarely, and never in the way a landmark is. Parc Monceau is a local park rather than a sight, so the people in it are families, runners and neighbours, and they thin out completely on a weekday morning. Nobody is queueing for a particular spot, which means we never have to wait for anything or work around a group photograph. It is the least contested location on my list.

My favourites: the small stone bridge over the stream, the long tree-lined gravel alleys, the colonnade by the water, and the open lawns between them. They sit within a short walk of each other, so a single unhurried session covers all of them without ever feeling like a schedule.

We photograph, and this is a park where I mean it. Cloud spreads the light evenly across the lawns and the water, which is the easiest light there is for portraits, and rain empties the paths and puts weather into the trees. The park has no real cover, so heavy rain is worth talking about, and the alternative is written into your recap the day before. We only move a session for weather that makes photographing impossible.

Yes, and if the priority is not being seen, this is the easiest park in Paris for it. Nobody here is looking at anything, so a walk to the bridge on a weekday morning needs no explanation and has no audience. 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, including how to get someone there without giving it away, is on the proposal photographer page.

Yes, and Parc Monceau 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 suits couples who want the photographs to look like their own life rather than like a trip, which is a request I get more often than people expect. 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 park 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 park changes so much with the season that the same alley in October looks nothing like it did in June, which makes either answer easy. 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 and grass rather than pavement, so a long hem picks things up, and a weekday morning means far fewer people watching you do it. All of it goes in the recap the day before, and the outfit guide covers the rest.

One hour covers the bridge, the water and one of the alleys, and it is what most couples book. Two hours walks the whole park without hurrying and leaves room to simply sit down for a while, which in a garden this calm is worth more than another backdrop. Parc Monceau is also the location where a one-hour session feels least rushed, because nothing in it needs queueing for.

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 gravel and grass underfoot, and the greens are heavy in late spring and summer, which is one of the few places I will actively suggest something pale. 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.