Somewhere, there is a person who will one day sit across a table from you. They'll watch you talk about something you love. They'll see you pause, laugh, lean in. And in that ordinary moment, they'll think: I like being here, with this person.

That moment is what a matrimonial photograph is supposed to promise.

Not a model's pose. Not a Pinterest recreation. Not the most impressive version of you — the most recognisable one. The you that the right person is going to fall for anyway.

This is how we think about matrimonial and dating profile portraits at our studio, and it changes almost everything about how the shoot is done.

"Say cheese" has produced more bad photographs than any camera ever has. It gives you a mouth shape — teeth bared, cheeks lifted — without the one thing that makes a smile a smile: something behind it.

Everyone knows the result. The photo where you're technically smiling and somehow it still isn't you. Eyes flat, jaw a little clenched, an expression you'd never make in real life because in real life, expressions aren't made — they happen.

This post is about how genuine smiles — the relaxed, teeth-showing, eyes-alive kind — actually get made in photographs. Not with tricks or filters, but with a two-step method any good portrait photographer should be running: one step for the body, one for the face. And a hundred-year-old economics principle explains why the method works so well.