The person who meets you at the gate

One of the first messages we read this year put the question without decoration. How do we know you will actually be there? It arrived close to midnight from a couple three thousand miles away who were being asked to hand over one private hour of their lives to two names on a website. It is a fair question and it deserves an answer rather than reassurance. Nobody sensible commits to a stranger abroad on the strength of a tidy grid of photographs. So here is what the arrangement actually is, and what you can check before you agree to any of it.

Begin with what you cannot do. You cannot walk into an office in Agrigento and shake a hand. You cannot ask a friend who used us, because most couples come to Sicily once and then go home. The reviews you read were written by people you have never met, about work you have not seen in full. Every piece of evidence in front of you was selected by us. That asymmetry is real, and pretending otherwise would be a poor start. What you can do is narrow it, by asking harder questions and paying attention to how specific the answers come back.

The second thing worth knowing is how few of us there are. Salvo La Rocca photographs every commission himself. There is no roster of associates, no second name dispatched when the calendar tightens. Cristiana Romano writes and leads every ceremony, and handles the paperwork and translation for couples arriving from abroad. Two people, both of whom you will have spoken to before you land. The voice answering your email on a Tuesday evening is the same voice that will tell you where to stand on the rock at 19:30 in July. That is not a marketing structure. It is simply the size of the thing.

Before you arrive there is a video call, and it is longer than you expect. We ask how you met, how you argue about plans, whether one of you hates being looked at. We ask about walking, because some locations involve a real climb and the ground at Punta Bianca is loose in places. Then we work backwards from the light. In July the good window opens around 19:30. In October it is closer to 17:15, and in February around 16:30. Everything else, the drive, the parking, the moment you turn the corner, is timed to that single fact.

If you are assessing us, or anyone else working in a country you do not live in, ask for a complete set from a single commission rather than a highlights reel. Anyone can assemble twenty strong frames from three years of work. Ask who will physically be present, by name. Ask what happens if that person is ill, and listen to whether the answer is honest or smooth. Ask to see work from the exact location in the exact month you are considering, because February light in the Valley of the Temples has almost nothing in common with July. Our /gallery is arranged so you can do that.

The day itself is unremarkable by design. We are at the meeting point early. You have an Italian mobile number that is answered by a person, not a form. We have already told you where to park, how long the walk takes, and what the ground is like underfoot. The first ten minutes are spent talking about nothing in particular, because the camera works better after that. By the time anything happens, you are not being handled by a supplier you found online. You are standing with two people you have been speaking to for months.

Trust built over email is not the same as trust built in a room, and we do not claim that it is. What we can do is be specific, be the same two people throughout, and answer the awkward question first rather than last. If you want to know more about who we are before committing to anything, read /about, then start a conversation with us and ask the things you have so far been too polite to ask.