We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Coliene Belle. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Coliene below.

Alright, Coliene thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One of the most important things small businesses can do, in our view, is to serve underserved communities that are ignored by giant corporations who often are just creating mass-market, one-size-fits-all solutions. Talk to us about how you serve an underserved community.

I love being able to photograph everyone’s family, and every couple. We are so lucky to have some amazing same-sex couples as clients, we are lucky to have some families with special needs children as clients. To me, there’s no better feeling than getting pictures with a family that have struggled with past photo experiences. We take our time with special needs clients, we understand that there may be a little extra time needed… or maybe the opposite. We may need to be super fast. And for our families with same-sex couples, there is no difference in how we photograph than another family. Just the same love. The same respect. The same that I would give any other family, or couple, or wedding. Because of course, to me, love is love. Another way I feel that we are serving some of the underserved in the wedding community, is that we are only focused on the very small weddings and elopements. We want to make sure that any couple, no matter how small, how intimate of a wedding… has professional wedding photos. Even if we are only wanted to cover for an hour, we are game.
We had a small wedding ourselves when we got married, and we didn’t have professional photography…. It’s totally something I would do over if I could. But, it’s what drives us to be open with couples for their wedding photography of how to work with their needs, and their budget.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

Ok! How to start off… so, we are a husband and wife team photographing in the metro atlanta area, but we are always open to traveling for a session! I’m a former pastry chef, and test baking turned into photographing my results, which turned into photographing more and more. The majority of our clients are families, we get along really well with kids. We love being able to get real laughs and smiles out of them. We are very natural light driven, so pretty much all our photography is done outdoors.
We also are elopement and small wedding photographers. We’ve done the larger weddings, and after a lot of consideration, we decided to only really focus on the small ceremonies. I love being able to capture the most intimate of ceremonies. My husband, Aldo, will second shoot with me. But he’s also able to marry couples. We love being a kinda one stop shop for couples with the photography and officiating. But we honestly give it so much heart, and reverence. We know it’s the biggest day of a lot of people’s lives!
We are really proud of having a really diverse client list. We are inclusive of all, all couples. All families. It’s so important for me to have my clients know how much I respect them and feel honored to get to photograph them.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

Gotta thank the moms for this one! We have been. So very lucky to get great word of mouth by moms on social media mom groups. It’s amazing how much it can do for us when a family recommends us to another family. So I guess in a sense, we just keep trying to have a good time with our clients, taking care of our clients, and that has just kept taking care of us.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

The goal! Hmmm, that’s such a good question! The goal driving me is totally to be inclusive to anyone that feels left out of having professional photography. I just want to keep being as accommodating to people as I can. I want to provide people with the wedding pictures they didn’t think they could have. I want to give the mom the pictures of the kid she wasn’t able to get before. I want to make the trans teen comfortable when I take their senior pictures.
I just want my photography to bring a good time for who is being photographed.

Contact Info:

• Website: Sweettoothphotography.com
• Instagram: @sweettoothpics
• Facebook: Sweet Tooth Photography

Image Credits
Photographer headshots by Colleen Elise Photography. All other photos provided by Sweet Tooth Photography.