Philosophy
Six rules
we don’t break.
Style guides are a thousand small decisions made the same way every time. Here are the six that shape every gallery before it leaves the studio.
01
Editorial, not journalistic.
Documentary photographers wait for moments. Editorial photographers build them. We sit in the middle: we wait for emotion, we shape light and composition. The frame should look like it could open a magazine, not just illustrate a captioned story.
02
Light decides the frame.
Before we look for an expression, we look at the window. Half our timeline planning is light planning — where the sun is at the ceremony, which corner of the venue holds 30 minutes of soft light at 18:00, which lamp is worth turning off. If the light is right, an ordinary moment becomes the cover. If the light is wrong, no expression saves the frame.
03
Tell the day, not the brief.
Every couple shows us a Pinterest board. We use it to understand register, not to copy frames. The photos that end up on your wall five years from now are the ones nobody pinned — they came from your day, not from somebody else’s.
04
One frame per moment.
We shoot fewer frames than most studios. A bride walking down the aisle generates one keeper, not twelve. Galleries get smaller and stronger when we cull ruthlessly. A 500-photo wedding gallery is a 500-photo wedding gallery — a 250-photo one is a wedding album.
05
Colour is a hand-mixed decision.
We do not apply presets. Every gallery is colour-graded by the photographer who shot it, then signed off by Andre. The palette we live in — muted earth tones, deep shadows, honeyed highlights — is consistent across the team because it was painted, not filtered.
06
Print is the destination.
A photo only exists when it is printed. Phones lose hard drives. Hard drives die. Pixieset accounts close. The frames you keep are the ones in your album, on your wall, in your parents’ living room. We design every gallery toward print — paper paper paper, then digital.