Cherie Steinberg Cote

Ten years ago, newspaper-based photojournalist Cherie Steinberg Cote had an epiphany while browsing a copy of New York Magazine with a striking spread of offbeat black-and-white and street-scene wedding pictures. ”I became a wedding photographer that day,” Steinberg Cote says. ”I’d never seen wedding photos like this. I didn’t want to do weddings the old-fashioned way.”

Eight years later, she is a wildly successful Beverly Hills-based wedding and portrait photographer to the stars and beyond, as well as a frequent contributor of photo spreads to a variety of magazines. She’s currently snapping a series of Saturday Night Live cast members and as an added bonus she’s got covers of Nikon World and Professional Photographer on her list of what she’s been doing lately. Steinberg Cote says that starting out her style was ”unusual” and credits it, as well as her ability to connect with her subjects, for her popularity.

”I loved the brides, the weddings and the girls,” Steinberg Cote says. ”I still do. We end up becoming buddies. I’m like the family doctor.” She gives an example of one bride who was married almost four years ago, who she’s photographed six times-wedding, post-wedding, pregnant, with a newborn, at the baby’s first birthday and beyond. The bride gave Steinberg Cote’s number to her father when he got married, raising the number of shoots in one family to 10.

As a beloved family institution-as well as a photographic rebel-Steinberg Cote has embraced her own brand of wedding photography, but not the salesmanship side of the business. She relies on Printroom to turn the buzz she creates with her photos into paying customers.

Printroom handles all the viewing and ordering for her brides, which she says is one of her biggest business-generators. She says she’s happy to load as many pictures into her galleries as she can, because she’s making money on them. ”The bride sends the gallery out to all her people, and I get thousands of hits,” she says. ”There are tons of people on my site who wouldn’t have been there before. It’s a great marketing tool.”

Because of her personal connection with her subjects, she doubly appreciates Printroom’s willingness to stay in the background and let customers feel like all their business is handled by her alone. ”A lot of companies out there try to get in touch with your clients and totally try to get people on their site,” she says. ”They send them tons of emails and really hound them. I was on another one before Printroom and I couldn’t get rid of them. They would email me five times a week.”

Steinberg Cote’s business is going like gangbusters, and she envisions a day in the not-too-distant future when she can turn the occasional mentoring she does today into a role as a part-time educator. She currently speaks at conferences and helps young photographers, but she hopes to be able to sign on some photographers to free up some of her time.

She’s happy to give out pointers to budding wedding and portrait photographers, taking a page from her playbook. She stresses that they shouldn’t limit themselves to one style of posing and lighting, to keep from getting pigeonholed by clients expecting an exact replica of images a photographer has shot before. She also stresses that a photographer needs to be able to click with her subject on a personal level to be able to get the right shots.

”I want them to talk to me. I see what they’re after, what the picture is for, what do you want to create, where are you going to put it in your house,” she explains. ”I get a sense of people, how dramatic or simple they are. Some people are blue jeans people, some come in elaborate costumes. I’m pretty good at that.”