A local photographer for your time in America

Hiring a photographer usually means a week of email, a quote that arrives last, and a portfolio you have no way to verify. This inverts that order. You choose the place and the kind of session, you see the price before you commit to anything, and the photographer who answers already works where you will be standing.

Twenty markets are covered. Fourteen are metros — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, Boston, Miami, Atlanta, Dallas–Fort Worth, Austin, Seattle, Denver, San Diego and Nashville. Six are places people travel to in order to be photographed: Las Vegas, Charleston, Savannah, Sedona, Napa Valley and Maui. The second group is not an afterthought; it is where the elopements and the destination weddings actually happen.

What a local photographer knows that a visiting one does not is the hour, and in this country also the paperwork. Washington Street in Brooklyn is empty until half past seven and a queue of tripods by nine. Sunset Cliffs in San Diego barely exists at high tide. Almost everyone eloping in Sedona assumes they need a National Park Service permit and needs a Forest Service one instead. None of that is findable in advance and all of it decides whether a session works.

Sessions run from a one-hour headshot to a full wedding day, and take in engagements, families, seniors, maternity, graduation, corporate work, property and food. The exact fee is confirmed in writing before you pay, covers the editing, and includes a private gallery delivered on a stated date, from 24 hours for real estate photography to 6 weeks for wedding photography. Nothing is billed per extra photograph. If the weather makes a location genuinely unusable, the session moves at no cost.