The next presenter for Paris is Nina Cornelison, a photo editor, which is a first for us. Here's where her name came from, why we asked you before we said yes, and what she's bringing to the stage.

Nina Cornelison has been editing photographs for twenty years and she has spent every one of those years inside the United States. She's seen most of the world the way the rest of us see a gallery proof, through a monitor. When we started talking to her about coming over she wrote this: "I've only traveled the world through my monitor, which doesn't give me stamps in the passport. So the opportunity to come to Paris and share what I do with your community would be pretty incredible." So the first stamp she gets in that passport is going to be for our community.

Where her eye comes from

Nina is a photo editor, and before she ever opened a wedding gallery she spent about ten years at an auction house colour matching prints of fine art, which is the sort of job where the painting is on the wall and a buyer is holding the printed page up next to it before deciding whether to bid. She's twenty years into post-production now, she matches digital to film, she takes a handful of clients a year and she'll fly out and work alongside them when they need her. Photographers she edits for have had their work run in Vogue, Town & Country, the New York Times and Brides, and you've probably admired something she coloured and given the credit to the photographer, because her work goes out under their name.

How she got on our radar

After every event we ask our presenters who they'd put on our stage next, and it's the best lead we get by a mile. It turns up names we would never have come to on our own.

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Christina McNeill

presented in Valencia and we adored her, all of us did, so when her list for Paris arrived we went through it slowly, and the name she pushed hardest was her own photo editor.

We had to think about that one. An editor on stage in front of a room full of wedding photographers is an unusual booking, so instead of guessing we asked you, in the Paris chat in our community app. Would you want to hear from an editor? 80% said yes, which settled it fairly quickly.

It makes sense when you look at where things are going. A lot of our sponsors do AI editing now and there'll be more of them every year, and at the same time plenty of you still edit your own work and want to get better at it. Those people deserve someone on a stage speaking to them.

We wanted more than a good editor though. We wanted someone who can teach, because you've all sat through a first-timer at some point and you deserve better than that. Nina has spoken at Wedding MBA in Las Vegas in front of a room full of photographers, Gather Around Film brought her in for an artist talk on her editing workflow and how she matches film to digital and took her through a live Q&A afterwards, and she runs her own six-week programme with live calls and editing hot seats where every photographer builds their own style guide. So we’re not simply flying over a first-time traveller with a remarkable editing background; she’s an experienced educator and presenter and she knows exactly how to communicate clearly with wedding photographers.

What she'll bring to Paris

Her whole approach is to treat your editing the same way you treat your brand. You bring her the pictures you're drawn to, she works out the patterns running through them, and that becomes the reference for everything you send a client afterwards. In her words, "It's the visual identity, like your editing is another visual identity just as much as your brand is." A good chunk of it is curation as well, which frames earn their place in the gallery and which ones you've been sending out of habit, and that's a conversation most of us need and never have.

She’s taking a leap travelling for the first time to come and join us, so let’s make her feel welcome in Paris!

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