THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE LENS
You’re here.
Most people aren’t. They look at the pictures and decide, and that’s fair. The work should speak first.
But you scrolled, and you clicked, and now you’d like to know who’s going to be standing three feet away from you on the most photographed day of your life. So let me tell you properly, instead of selling you.
What we do is personal. We’ll be in the room for the quiet minute before the doors open. We’ll be close enough to hear what your father says to you. There’s a wall that usually sits between “the vendor” and “the client,” and that wall is the single biggest enemy of a good photograph. Every minute it’s up is a minute you’re performing instead of living.
So. Hello. Let’s take it down now and save ourselves the trouble later.
01 THE NAME
My name is Kreshnik. It’s an old Albanian name. It means the brave victorious leader, and it’s also a word for a knight. That’s a great deal to hand a baby. Everyone calls me Nik.
I grew up in Prishtina. In 1998 I was thirteen, and over about two years the ordinary parts of my life closed one at a time. School first. Then basketball practice. Then going out with friends at all. The last thing to close was the church, and that’s the one I still remember.
“Not being able to have a routine and living in fear as a young person has had an impact on me. I had to mature very quickly.”
CHESTNUT HILL LOCAL, 2014
My father was a scientist in a medical facility. My mother ran the main warehouse at a power plant.
I don’t tell you this for sympathy. I tell you because it’s the whole reason I do this job. When you’re young and everything ordinary gets taken away, you learn precisely what an ordinary thing is worth. A normal Tuesday. A full room. Somebody’s mother laughing at something her brother just said.
02 HOW I GOT HERE
I got to America in a way I still don’t quite believe.
“I actually won the right of American citizenship without ever being in America.”
There’s a lottery. Fifty-five thousand people a year. I was one of them.
I landed in 2010 with no family in this country. I found a photography job in my first month and couldn’t live on the wages, so I waited tables instead. Texas, then Oklahoma, then Philadelphia. Bellini Grill for three years, then Trattoria Moma up in Mt. Airy.
I saved my tips and bought cameras with them. That’s the actual origin of this studio. No loan, no school, nobody in the family already doing it. Tips.
And Philadelphia had me immediately: narrow streets, old houses, lots of history and the best part, ‘The City of Brotherly Love.’
People ask about my first wedding. It was 2006, back home, and I honestly can’t remember whose it was. Five hundred weddings later I remember pieces of nearly all of them.
“A good photograph is like a gem. With age it has more value, and its emotional importance increases more and more.”
ASKED WHERE MY IDEAS CAME FROM, 2014. SEVENTY WEDDINGS IN.
I’d give you the same answer today.
03 DONA
She married me, which remains the least explicable thing on this page.
Dona, whose full name is Liridona, got her first film camera in 1998, in Tuzi. She still has the pictures.
Before she’d ever set foot in New York she had hung work in Times Square, at Art Scope Miami, and at the Louvre. She moved to the city in 2018 and in her first September photographed fifteen fashion shows in a single day at Spring Studios. Since then: Anna Wintour, Tom Ford, Jennifer Lopez, Billie Eilish, Cardi B, both Hadids. The International Filmmaker Festival of New York named her Photographer of the Year in 2019. The New York State Assembly named her Distinguished Woman of the Year in 2024.
Here’s why that matters on your wedding day and not just on a résumé. A fashion photographer gets one pass down a runway and a fraction of a second to make someone look like the best version of themselves. Dona has done that thousands of times, under the worst light in the world, with people who are paid to be difficult. Give her a whole evening and people she actually likes, and it isn’t close.
04 DAVID
When Dona and I got married, David is the one who photographed it.
David’s father was a photographer. He left home and came to America so he could keep being one. So David didn’t discover this. He grew up inside it. The waiting. The way a room changes when the light does. The patience not to press the shutter yet.
He puts it better than I can: “The only thing we have in life is the connections we make, along with the moments we share.”
I tell couples that choosing a photographer is really about whether that person knows you. I wasn’t going to say that out loud and then hire a stranger for my own wedding. David knew us. That was the entire decision, and I’d make it again.
05 A FULL TABLE
The first New Year’s Eve I spent with Dona’s family, what I remember is the noise.
The chaos of it, everyone talking over everyone. I hadn’t had that in a long time, and what surprised me was how fast I stopped feeling like a guest in it.
We moved to Brooklyn in 2021 to be near them. She had a family here. I didn’t.
Last year we had a daughter. Dona said “I like the name Learta” on a car ride, I said yes, and that was the whole decision. About a minute, start to finish. Learta means born golden. Her mother’s name, Liridona, means born free. Mine means knight. Subtlety is not a family trait.
She changed the job, too.
I catch myself daydreaming about her father-daughter dance at a wedding that’s twenty-five years from now.
And when there’s a toddler at a wedding these days I stop and get to know them first, and their parents with them, before I photograph any of it. Costs me ten minutes. Best ten minutes of the day.
06 SINCE WE’RE BEING HONEST
I lose things. I put an object down and it ceases to exist.
I procrastinate on anything personal. The mail sits for a week.
When I want something, I want it already. Patience was never in the name.
On a day off I’m traveling, or on the living room floor. I’m meant to be answering emails and instead I drift into the other room where Learta is, and the emails wait.
07 HOW WE ACTUALLY WORK
We don’t direct much. We watch, we anticipate, we get close, we stay out of the way. When we do step in, for the portraits, for the twenty minutes that are only the two of you, we direct properly, because “just be natural” is the least useful instruction ever given to two people in formalwear.
We don’t chase trends. What’s fashionable in wedding photography right now will look like a haircut in ten years. We’re making pictures your children will find in a box and recognise you in.
And we know what this day is costing you. Not the money. The planning. Nine months of decisions. By the time you reach us you’re tired of being asked things. So our part is built to be the easy part.
Someone once asked me to describe our style, and what came out was: a group of misfits joined together by the love of photography. Years later I still think that’s the truest sentence I’ve said about us.
If you’ve read this far
You’re the kind of person we do our best work with. Someone who wanted to know who we were before deciding. Come talk to us. Not a sales call.
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