The part I cannot photograph

We booked Mara because of the work and kept recommending her because of the day itself. She was invisible for eleven hours and then handed us a gallery that made my mother cry in a supermarket car park.

Our previous conference photographer gave us 900 usable-ish files three weeks late. Mara gave us 400 excellent ones, sorted by session, before lunch the next day. The difference in our campaign performance was not subtle.

She photographs a crowd the way most people photograph a face. Our audience images are now the only thing we use to sell tickets.

I asked for one photograph, my wife walking into a room full of people she loves. I got that one and three hundred others I did not know I needed. The forty print box lives in the hallway.

Two hundred candles and no flash. I genuinely did not think it was possible to photograph our gala properly and the donor campaign that came out of it raised more than the last two years together.

Thirty four guests and a chapel with awful light. Mara turned up early, worked out where the good light was hiding, and never once asked us to do something twice.

The planning call before the day was worth the fee on its own. She caught two timeline problems our venue had missed and the whole evening ran better because of it.

Booked on a Tuesday for the Friday after a photographer dropped out. Calm, fast, brilliant. Our team still uses those portraits on every profile.