Wedding proposal photos in Paris

The sessions play out in four basic ways…

Horse-drawn carriage:

The couple ride in from the south side of pont Alexandre III near l’hôtel des Invalides. I take pictures as they arrive, step down from the carriage and walk to the middle of the bridge. I take portraits of the happy couple and all the more pictures while he’s asking his question. After that I photograph them with champagne with the horse and back inside the carriage.

Rolls-Royce limousine:

The fiancé- and fiancée-to-be arrive in a majestic vintage Silver Cloud at place du Trocadéro or elsewhere around the Eiffel Tower. The peak moment is often timed to coincide with the first five minutes of the hour at night when the hundreds of little white lights sparkle and flash on the tower. More often then not there are plenty of people around who notice what’s going on and cheer and applaud.

Photography workshop:

The event is staged as photography lessons: We start at a café and I teach the fiancée-to-be the base technological concepts of photography. Then we go for a walk in Paris among plenty of historic monuments and take pictures and I continue the conversation on technical topics, discussing them from different angles, to make sure they are all understood. At some moment the man asks me to take portraits of him and his girlfriend and will say quietly say to me, “This is it.”

Paparazzi mode:

Otherwise, I take these photographs completely in a completely incognito kind of way at a distance of at least 15 feet with a long telephoto lens, taking pictures in a candid manner from perhaps the other side of the street. After the big moment I get closer, I change the lens for a transtandard zoom, I turn on the flash and I take the portraits of the happy couple.

Very careful planning is required when I will take the pictures incognito, in a paparazzi way. Typically this means sending many e-mails back and forth, deciding on an exact time and a precise location and sending pictures of myself and each of the couple, as well as specifying how each of us will be dressed.

One frustrating thing about taking wedding proposal pictures outside is that there are generally dozens or hundreds of people in any given spot in Paris, resulting in images cluttered with random tourists and other visitors in the background. The trick for avoiding this is to plan the session very early, perhaps at 8:00 am. At that time in the morning I’ll be able to photograph you and your loved one with a clean, pure image of the City of Light behind.

You will be able to download the pictures of your elopement the next day in a .Zip from a link I’ll send by e-mail and if you are not traveling with a computer I can upload the photos to Nikon Image Space, where you can view and share the images on social media with a smartphone or a tablet.