Like many photographers, she began by taking portraits of her friends. “I would photograph them just so I could take pictures of someone,” she says. One of the friends she photographed had connections at British Telecom, and the company took notice of her portraits.

“My first professional job was for British Telecom,” de Zulueta remembers. “When they came to Spain, they needed pictures of all the personnel and directors. I was very excited about that.”

Though it was a commercial shoot, de Zulueta tried to portray the same look she was already achieving with her friends’ portraits: “simple and happy and human.” Rather than shoot a formal portrait, she wants to capture emotions.

“First, I open myself to [my subjects]. I try to get to them to talk to me and I never stop talking to them,” she says. But for the British Telecom shoot, “I was forced to use flash and that is really different."

For her personal work, de Zulueta uses a CANON EOS-3 Camera with a 50 mm f/1.4 or 85 mm f/1.8 fix lens, shooting color on KODAK EKTACHROME 100 Plus Professional Film (EPP) and black-and-white work on KODAK PROFESSIONAL BW400CN Film. The other 30 percent of the time, she shoots digitally for her commercial clients.

“I love textures and I love to develop film,” she says. “Film—it is lifelike.”

De Zulueta asks if she can talk about “this subject I like very much,” then launches into it: “I rarely use [digital]. It is very easy to shoot with a digital camera. Even if the result is not good, you can spend lots of time after and then completely change what you shot at the beginning, and that is a pity. I admire photographers who do wonderful images at the time of shooting.”

She does enhance her prints with the help of a friend at a local lab. “We just give priority to one color or the other,” she says.

“I like to experiment with color,” she continues. “With natural light, I like to [use] very low shutter speeds. As we work this way, the air gets the color of the dresses. The clothes [move] in the air and the floors and the walls will take the light and will change in color. I work in extreme lighting conditions because this is essential. You get spectacular and surprising results.”

It’s the love for the unexpected that first got de Zulueta interested in photographing weddings.

“I started after I got married,” she says. “I realized how much I could do because I didn’t like the pictures that they made of my wedding. I wanted there to be more natural light, more [candid] portraits. I don’t understand why you would ask somebody to pose, standing. I prefer people moving when I take the picture.”

She infuses her commercial and portrait shoots with movement, too. “I am always moving when I shoot and I have my subjects moving all the time,” she says.

That love for movement comes up again when de Zulueta describes “Desveladas” (“Kept Awake”), a personal project she calls “close to my heart.” The project is a complex work including photography, video images, music, poetry, and live performances.

“In a strict sense, we could say that the main subject is oriental dance (belly dance),” she explains. “But in a wider sense, it is more than that. It’s an approach to an art that connects almost mystically with Mother Nature, a vast language, amazingly delicate and full of great elegance, which is practically unknown in Western society.

“This project looks over oriental dance as it is—a beautiful way of communication of the desert—manifesting its different elements—water, fire, earth, and air—through the female belly, arms, chest, hips. Such a beauty and intensity must be kept and shown in their total fulfillment.”

De Zulueta hopes to find a sponsor so that she and her collaborators on the project can finance an exhibition.

But contrary to the trend toward oversized wedding albums, de Zulueta presents her clients with a book of 4 x 5 images, which she prints on KODAK Royal Generations Paper. “I don’t like big pictures,” she explains.

When de Zulueta photographs a wedding, she brings one assistant and is sometimes joined by other photographers who observe her work. She also works with others on commercial shoots.

“One thing that I love is to collaborate with my partners,” she says. “I have partners that work with me very frequently. I pass work to them, shoots and so on. I love teaching photography to other partners. They help me and then I teach them how I work. I realized that the more I teach people, the more I show how I work, the more I learn. I progress faster.”

Some of her partners are friends. Others are part of her photography agency, Ingenio Fotógrafos.

“My mother many times tells me, ‘Don’t teach all your tricks, save something for yourself,’” she laughs. “But when I teach my more secret tricks, I find that my peers’ work looks more like my work, and then I change my work more in reaction to that.”

Having connections also helps de Zulueta get referrals; most of her wedding work comes through friends or family. “People know that I care about the images,” she says. “People say that they look like they are themselves [in my photos].”

It’s a quality that also infuses all of her work, including commercial shoots for fashion and cosmetics, and even a bit of celebrity portraiture, such as a series of photos of Enrique Iglesias.

“One is the picture that he wanted me to take, and another one is the picture I wanted to take of Enrique Iglesias laughing,” she says. “He didn’t like the laughing picture. But after we had this photo, he started to allow people to publish photos of him laughing.”

De Zulueta also brings some fashion sense to her personal portraits. “I want to mix both all the time,” she says. “In fashion, I always try to have my human touch. That is why I like very much the work of Peter Lindbergh, Ellen Von Unwerth, Javier Valhonrat, and Mario Testino. And I find that in my portrait work, every person has a lot of glamour within.”

“Man is a symbolic animal,” she reflects. “I don’t talk about this to my subjects; I talk about other things. But I push [the photo session] to this kind of philosophy. It is a very deep subject. It is about the energy that flows between us. I would love to see my work travel along in time so that the grandson of my subject will know these people [in the photo].”

For now, de Zulueta is expanding her repertoire even more, taking portraits of children with disabilities, and adding equipment to make her portraits “more artistic.” And of course, she’s staying extremely positive. “I have a lot of work every day and many doors are opening now," she says.

And just like de Zulueta keeps her subjects comfortable, she urges aspiring photographers to get comfortable, too. “You have to find a way that you are comfortable working. We all look at [other photographers’] work, but it is important that you are not known as somebody that copies the style of somebody else. You have to finally be comfortable with your style.”

It’s clear that de Zulueta’s style has put her subjects at ease. She says her proudest moments are when clients count her as a friend.

“I receive mail from my clients when they have newborns. I feel very proud of that,” she says. “When the family is sending messages to me from the hospital that they send to their friends and family, I am so happy.”