California,
in full light
Orange County · San Diego · Temecula · Ojai
Half my year is here. It is not a second office and it is not a destination fee — I live between Florence and Orange County, which means a wedding in San Diego is a drive and not a flight, and the venue walk-through happens weeks before, in person.
The same eye.A different afternoon.
A drive,
not a
flight
Most photographers who shoot both Italy and California are visiting one of them. The practical difference is not romantic: there is no destination fee on a Californian wedding because there is no destination. I see the venue before the day, in person, rather than on a website. I arrive at six in the morning without anybody having paid for a hotel. And if the ceremony moves indoors at four o’clock, I already know what the indoor room looks like at four o’clock.
The other half of it is what I bring back. Twelve years of Italian villas is not a decoration on a Californian wedding — it is a habit of working around a day rather than through it, formed somewhere where you are never allowed to stop a hundred people for twenty minutes.
How I workMeet me here.
Then meet me
there.
A couple on this site was photographed on a beach in Laguna in December and married on Lake Como the following June. That is not a package. It is the ordinary consequence of living in both places: the hour in front of the camera that makes the wedding day easy can happen near your home, months before, instead of being squeezed into a foreign morning you have never seen.
California weddings begin at $3,890 for photography, and at $5,990 with film.
Orange County
Home base. Newport, Laguna, Yorba Linda, Anaheim Hills — near enough that a venue walk-through happens weeks before, in person, and on the day I arrive before anyone else without anybody paying for a night.
Richard Nixon Presidential Library Embassy Suites by Hilton Anaheim South Treasure Island
San Diego and the north county
The bay, and the coast up through Carlsbad and Encinitas. Ninety minutes south of home, and in winter the only part of Southern California where the light comes along the beach rather than down onto it.
Catamaran Resort Encore Event Center St Patrick Catholic Church
Temecula and inland
Wine country and the hills behind it. Inland the afternoon lasts longer than it does on the coast, which is worth an hour of portraits you would not get in Newport on the same date.
Ventura County and Ojai
An hour and a half north, and a different light entirely — drier, harder, and gone sooner behind the ridge.
Florence,
half the year
Tuscany, Lake Como, Rome, the Amalfi Coast.
All selected work
Tell me where
you are going.