Wedding photography, planned properly

01 / What you are booking

A photographer who has already thought about your day

Photographs are made once, while the day is happening, or not at all. Most couples feel that when they start looking, which is why the choice tends to sit heavier than the price suggests, and why every portfolio starts to look the same after the fourth one.

So here is the honest version of what separates one photographer from another. It is rarely the camera, and it is rarely the eye either, because most of the photographers you are looking at can make a beautiful frame. It is whether the person turning up has thought about your specific day in advance, or is going to work it out on the morning while you are getting ready for your wedding.

On the practical side, weddings are covered on digital as standard and film is something you add on top. A good number of couples do add it, and when they do I shoot medium format and 35mm through the day, colour and black and white, running alongside the digital. Film is the reason a gallery still looks right in twenty years, and it is also the reason I work slowly, which is usually what people mean when they say they do not want to feel photographed all day. Either way you receive one coherent gallery rather than two sets that look like they came from different weddings. Coverage starts from €3,499, from the preparations through to an hour after the dancefloor opens, with a 24-page album, a preview gallery within seven days and the full gallery within forty-five.

02 / Before the day

The two conversations that decide how your photographs turn out

The first is the timeline, and I have it with your planner rather than only with you. I spent years in advertising agencies running productions, which is mostly the work of finding out where a plan breaks before it breaks. A wedding timeline breaks in the same few places every time: the portraits are scheduled for the hour when the light is at its worst, the group photographs are put somewhere that quietly costs you forty minutes of your own cocktail hour, or the ceremony runs twenty minutes late and nobody has decided in advance what gives. We go through it in advance, agree what moves if the day slips, and your planner and I leave that conversation holding the same document.

The second is the list of what cannot be missed. Not a shot list of poses, which nobody wants and which turns a photographer into a stage manager. A list of people and moments: your grandmother, the friend flying in from a long way away, the one group photograph you will actually put on a wall, the toast your brother has been writing for a month. I would rather know all of that three weeks out than be guessing at it across a room of a hundred and twenty people I have never met.

That second conversation is the one I care most about, and it is the reason this page exists. The people in the room on that day are the reason there is a day at all, and a photograph of one of them can only be made while it is happening. Knowing who they are beforehand costs one phone call, and it is almost never discussed before the morning of the wedding.

03 / On the day, and after

Planned in advance so that nothing has to stop for the camera

All of that planning has one purpose: everything is worked out in advance, so nothing on the day comes as a surprise. It also helps that I did not learn to photograph people at weddings. I have been photographing for more than fifteen years, since I was a kid, and for most of that time my photography work was made in the street, photographing strangers in Paris who were not posing and could not be asked to do anything again. You cannot direct a stranger and you never get a second attempt, so you learn to notice a moment forming a few seconds before it does, find the light and the angle while it is still coming, and take the picture without interrupting it.

That is an unusual route into wedding photography, and it is the whole reason your day will not feel like a photoshoot. Outside the few moments we have agreed on in advance, I interrupt nothing. The first time you see yourself in the mirror after your make-up is a moment between you and the person who has just spent two hours with you, and I am not going to step into it or ask you to do it again for the camera. The same holds for the rest of the day: I am not stopping your morning to restage a detail, interrupting a conversation to get a better angle on it, or running your day from behind a camera. There is a portrait window, agreed in advance and kept short, where I will give you some gentle direction and then let the two of you get on with it. Otherwise I am watching rather than directing, and couples tend to describe the result as looking like the day actually felt.

A digital preview gallery lands within seven days, while people are still talking about it, and the full private gallery within forty-five. Every photograph is individually edited by me. If you have added film, it is developed and scanned in Paris. Prints and framed pieces are ordered straight from your gallery, and a 24-page album is part of the standard coverage.

04 / Where I work

Do you photograph weddings outside Paris?

Paris and Île-de-France ↗

City weddings, town hall ceremonies, château receptions within reach of Paris. I live here and I know the light at every hour and the corners that stay quiet, which matters more on a tight city timeline than anywhere else.

Provence and the south ↗

A regular part of my year rather than a special trip. I arrive the day before, walk the ground, and work out where the day is going to be at its best before it starts.

An engagement session first ↗

Most couples I photograph book a session before the wedding. It is the cheapest way to arrive at your own wedding already comfortable in front of a camera, and to know how I work before the day that matters.

05 / Practical questions

Your questions about wedding photography