The studio behind the frame.
Solenne is a one-photographer studio in Portland, Oregon, and the small teaching program that grew out of it. This is the long version of how that happened.
I started in a courthouse hallway with a borrowed lens.
My first wedding was a courthouse elopement I shot on a camera I didn’t fully know how to use, for a couple who couldn’t afford the photographer they actually wanted. I still have that gallery. It is not good. It is also the most honest thing I’ve ever shot, because I had no idea yet how to pose anyone into looking like something they weren’t.
Twelve years and roughly 340 weddings later, that’s still the only rule that survived: get close enough to the truth of the day that the photographs don’t need much help. Everything else — the gear, the posing language, the six-page shot list I no longer bring — I’ve thrown out and rebuilt at least three times.
Around wedding two hundred, other photographers started asking how I worked a room. I said yes to a few one-on-one mentorships, then a workshop, then a cohort. The Atelier is that same conversation, formalized enough to actually teach.
Portland, Oregon · studio loft, 2026
Three things I actually believe, instead of ten things that sound good.
Document, don’t direct
Posing gets you fifteen good minutes. Documenting gets you the whole day — including the parts nobody thought to stage.
Edit like an editor
A wedding gallery is a story with a shape. My job is cutting eight hundred good photos down to the two hundred that are actually telling it.
Teach what actually happened
Every Atelier module comes from a real wedding day, including the ones that went sideways. Especially those.
2,400 photographers have sat where you’re sitting.
A ten-week program for working photographers who want to shoot fewer weddings, better, and charge accordingly.
Explore The Atelier
Let’s see if the day is free.
Solenne books eighteen full weddings a year, by design. Tell us the date and the room and we’ll tell you honestly if it fits.