Sarah Stefani

I photographed weddings for ten years, and I was not particularly good at the beginning.

My first season I booked one wedding. I had no network, no one in the industry who knew my name, and no clear idea of how anyone got the work I wanted. I lived on the French Riviera, which sounds like an advantage and is mostly the opposite. Every photographer in Europe wants to shoot there.

I finished at Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild, at the Ritz, in private villas and in masserias in Puglia. Nobody introduced me. I built a website and an image consistent enough that people found me and asked for me specifically. That website still brings me enquiries now, almost a year after I stopped shooting, which tells you something about where the work actually comes from.

The part i got wrong

Somewhere in the middle of that climb, I lost my own style.

I had something recognisable. Quiet, delicate, a little ethereal, with an edge of fashion. It was the reason people chose me, and I did not understand that at the time. As I moved into the luxury market, I convinced myself that what had worked lower down would not work higher up. That I needed to look more like everyone else at that level. So I edited towards the trend, added saturation, and slowly stopped recognising my own feed.

It worked, in the sense that I kept booking. It also blurred the only thing that made me worth choosing.

I would not do it again. The clients who paid me the most were not asking me to look like anyone else.

The part I got wrong for longer

For several years I was chasing a version of success that belonged to someone else. A specific photographer’s career, a specific way of working, a set of ambitions I had absorbed without examining.

Then I worked with him. Nothing was hidden from me, nothing was a surprise. But seeing a life up close is not the same as imagining it, and within a day I understood that I did not want it. Not the travel, not the scale, not the pace.

That was a hard thing to realise after years of aiming at it. It is also the most useful thing I know. Most advice in this industry points in one direction, towards growth, towards volume, towards becoming a studio. It is worth checking whether that is your destination before you spend five years walking towards it.

Why I write instead of shoot

stopped photographing weddings in October 2025, for health reasons. I work from home now, a few hours a day.

It means I am no longer competing with anyone reading this, and I no longer have anything to protect. I can tell you exactly how I negotiated with clients, exactly what I charged and why, and exactly which of my decisions I regret. A photographer still selling weddings cannot write that page honestly, and most of them do not.

What I am actually interested in

Not weddings, if I am honest with you. Weddings were where I learned, and where I have something precise to offer.

What holds my attention is the other thing: how a photographer becomes someone people choose. Finding what you actually stand for, building an image around it, and making it visible to the people who will pay for it. I was better at that than I was at anything else, and I am still doing it now, on this site, in front of you.

If that is useful to you, start with the free checklist.