We’re very, very lucky to have a holiday house in Cowes, on Phillip Island. A feeling of calm and peacefulness come over me whenever we cross the bridge on to the Island. It’s amazing. We go there as often as possible. This summer we’ve been here for two glorious weeks - heaven! Phillip Island is located about 140 km south east from Melbourne. The Island is known by its Traditional Owners, the Bunurong people, as Millowl. At first glance it might not seem like it, but there’re actually heaps of things to do! Here are five of our faves: Visiting the beach, of course! No matter the weather or se ..read more

This summer I want to challenge myself and document our days in a ‘100 days of summer project’, because there’s only 18 summers in a childhood I want to preserve and bottle up this summer in a photo album. I’m aiming for 100 images, one a day - give or take. It doesn’t matter if it’s the big girl camera or the iPhone. Doesn’t matter if it’s done quickly on the go or carefully planned. No need for perfection, just documenting summer as it happens, one photo at a time. I’m excited and I’m looking forward to just playing, being creative and having fun with photography. Do you want to join me? I ..read more

Let’s talk a bit more about how documentary family photography and capturing the everyday in photographs over the course of a year looks and feels like and why my documentary approach will deliver invaluable images for you and your kids. In documentary photography we use a photojournalistic approach. That means that I don’t intervene, I don’t pose, I don’t direct, I don’t tell you how to dress and I won’t tell you to ‘say cheese’. Documentary photography is about representing your life as it is right in that moment. When I come to your home my job is to make you forget that I’m there, to blend ..read more

… is the hill where every family can show up - in life and at their family photo session - as they truly are, as their authentic selves, where they’ll be remembered as the people they were, where there’s no fake smiles, where there’s no need to have it all together, where there’s no pressure to be perform or conforming, where nobody needs to be perfect. Can we please stop placing this ridiculous pressure on ourselves that everything needs to look and feel like a highlight reel? Just because there’s laundry on the floor or the kitchen table, doesn’t mean that we haven’t got our shit together. L ..read more

August has been a month of big changes for me! After nearly seven months of extended leave to focus on my family photography business it was time to head back to my corporate job - with very mixed feelings. It’s not that I hate this corporate job (when I’m not a photographer, I’m an economist!), it’s more that I didn’t want to give up the freedom and the extra time that my long service leave gave me. The time to dream big, the time to ponder, the time to create, the time to learn new things, the time to start a newsletter and the time to keep building this photography business. And then I sat ..read more

There’s two questions I get asked pretty much every time I tell someone that I’m a documentary family photographer: What is documentary family photography? - and Why do you photograph that way? The first one I’ve answered in a previous blog post. So lets dig into why I make photographs in a documentary or photojournalistic way. I want to remember not only what life looked like, but how it felt, and I want you to be able to do the same. And in my opinion unposed and candid photographs can convey that feeling so much better. So many feelings cannot be captured in a posed photograph. Many ..read more

Documentary family photography means that a photographer uses a photojournalistic approach in photographing a family. That is the photographer does not intervene with the scenes in front of her camera at all: there is no posing, no directing, no telling you where to stand or what to wear, no shuffling of furniture or other items, and most importantly no telling you to “say cheese”. The photographer simply comes and “documents” your family as you go about your life in an authentic and honest way. Because documentary family photography is an ‘approach’ and not an ‘aesthetic’, you may find vast ..read more