Wedding photography in France

Ten hours is long enough to cover a wedding as one continuous account rather than as a set of highlights, and that is the point: the photographs people keep are rarely the ones on the schedule. They are the twenty minutes before the ceremony, the face of somebody watching from the third row, the part of the evening nobody planned.

The venue is contacted before the day about access, timings and shelter. It sounds administrative and it is the single thing that most often saves a wedding gallery. Estates have rules about where a photographer may stand during the ceremony, châteaux have curfews, and half the venues in France have one room that is unusable after four in the afternoon. Knowing that in advance changes the schedule; discovering it on the day changes the photographs.

Four hundred retouched photographs arrive as a full private gallery within three weeks. That is longer than our other sessions and deliberately so — a wedding is several thousand frames before selection, and rushing that stage is how galleries end up padded with near-duplicates. The price is agreed in writing beforehand and does not move.