Portugal

Most of what we do in Portugal begins long before the session itself. A first conversation, usually in French or in English, sometimes in Portuguese when one of you grew up there and the other did not. We ask about the way you met, the way you argue, the things you have decided not to invite into your wedding. We listen more than we talk. By the time we arrive on the day, the session is already half-built — not on a shot list, but on an understanding.

The work itself unfolds wherever it makes sense. A morning in Lisbon, climbing out of the Alfama into the white light of Graça. An afternoon in Sintra, between ferns and stone, the kind of place where you do not need to be told to stand still. A weekend in the Algarve, walking from cliff to cove and back. The Douro valley in the week before the harvest, when the vines have turned and the wineries are quiet again. We do not promise any particular place. We promise that wherever we end up, we will know it well enough to disappear into it.

We speak Portuguese natively. That is not a marketing line. It means that when a permit officer in Cascais asks why we are photographing on the beach at six in the morning, the conversation takes ninety seconds instead of fifteen minutes. It means that when your grandmother in the Alentejo wants to tell you a story before you go, you are not the only one in the room who understands her. It is the kind of detail that does not appear in the photographs, but that you can feel in them.

We have been doing this since 2008 from a small house in Limoges, in central France. We work in Portugal often enough to know the country, and rarely enough to keep wanting to come back. We are not local — and we have stopped pretending otherwise. What we offer instead is a long view: thirteen years of weddings and engagements, a vocabulary of light and architecture that travels with us, and a fluency in three languages that lets us hold the whole conversation.

Sessions in Portugal are arranged by personalised quote. We do not publish a rate card because no two sessions are alike: a one-hour engagement in Lisbon is not the same project as a weekend together in the Douro, and we would rather give you a number that reflects what you actually want than a number that flatters our website. Most engagement sessions sit in the range of a half-day in a single location. Longer formats — two days, a weekend, a small elopement with two witnesses — are quoted separately.

Travel is included for sessions within ninety minutes of Lisbon. Algarve, Douro and Porto are added as a flat travel line. We handle our own permits where the location requires them. Delivery is a private online gallery, four to six weeks after the session, with high-resolution downloads. A printed heirloom album is offered as an option afterwards — not as a default, because we have noticed that the couples who order the album are the ones who asked for it themselves.

If you are already planning a destination wedding with us in France, the Portugal session is folded into the same contract and the same quote. If the wedding is elsewhere or with another studio, that is fine too — we work as often on stand-alone sessions as on full wedding stories.