I’d like you to meet Mel and Jay, and their adorable fur baby Hurley. These guys are total rockstars – especially the Hurley the uber-fashionable dog. I love when people want to include their pets in their portrait sessions!
We caught up for this super-lovely sunset beachside sweetheart session and even grabbed a few shots for their family Christmas card!
Damian and Helena are adorable. Damian and Helena are in love. Damian and Helena are engaged. Damian and Helena are getting married tomorrow!
Every time I look at their engagement photos from our lovely sun-drenched session at Point Danger and Greenmount headlands I get a warm fuzzy. I hope they give you a warm fuzzy too.
One of my favourite things about family portrait sessions is trying to get stellar smiles out of children. I am the youngest of my generation in my family, so I never grew up around children – I never babysat for young siblings or cousins, and dealing with children is something I’ve learned a lot about very quickly since I first picked up my camera and pointed it at a kid. Yet there’s something about making a child smile that’s incredibly rewarding, and it never wears off! If I can get a smile out of a little one, I feel like I’ve accomplished something with my day.
Having said that, I left this particular shoot with Dayna, Ben, Charlotte and Jacob feeling pretty accomplished – these guys shared a HEAP of smiles with me, and left me feeling super-joyous. If you have little ones of your own, Dayna’s range of kids clothing and accessories might leave you feeling super-joyous too – you should check out her store, Goosebump Clothing and Accessories! You might recognise some of her little models from below, too…
But I do know when I’ll be back again. I’ll be back in July. Never fear!
Travelling is a huge passion of mine, and I’m lucky enough to be doing a lot of it this month! June will see me hit the big smoke in Melbourne, a music festival in Bundaberg and an island wedding in Fiji – but it won’t see me at my desk, answering emails, anywhere near as much as usual so this is just a heads up for you, my lovely website-reader-er!
I’ll be back (in black, if you will, like ACDC, or in town like Thin Lizzy, or at your door like Maroon5 or just back back back back like SHINee) in early July and getting stuck straight back into it! Huzzah!
If you do need to get in touch with me before then, email is definitely the way to go (or the form on my contact page right here) and I promise I’ll get back to you as soon as I possibly can.
In the meantime, rug up, drink tea, dance a lot to keep warm and I’ll see you very soon!
Here’s a little something to keep my website warm until I return, from the Turner family’s gorgeous shoot recently!
It’s true what they say about pregancy giving already-beautiful women a radiant glow. Just check out Carlie in the shots below if you want proof. Glowing! Positively iridescent!
This was a very special shoot for me because we held it on my partner’s parents property in Uki, nestled in the hills surrounding Mt. Warning. Shooting there was definitely a dream come true, and I’m happy to report that baby Oliver was welcomed to the world safe and sound! Congratulations, Carlie and Blake!
Before I introduce you to this incredibly gorgeous couple, let’s talk about engagement sessions.
I LOVE engagement sessions. Engagement sessions are the best!
Originally couples had engagement sessions with their wedding photographers so that they’d have a nice photo to send to the newspaper along with their engagement announcement, but there are bunch of other great reasons to consider having an engagement shoot before you get married.
How do you feel about having your photo taken? Most people cringe at the thought – we all have an image in our heads of what we look like, and with cameras everywhere these days often the pictures we suddenly find ourselves tagged in on Facebook at that family barbeque last week don’t match up with that mental picture. “I hate having my picture taken.” You’d be amazed how often I hear that sentence uttered!
Here’s the single greatest thing about engagement sessions – you get used to being photographed before your big day! So when it counts, when your photographer pulls out that big black camera and aims it your way, you won’t panic because you’ve done this before! You also get a feel for how your photographer works and what they’ll be asking you to do on your wedding day, not to mention you all get to know each other better, which is great because it establishes trust between you – and that means way better wedding photos for you!
But that’s not all – if you’re a bit crafty with your scheduling, engagement sessions can give clever brides a chance to try out their makeup and see how it looks photographed. You’ll also end up with a bunch of great photos of the two of you that you can use on save the date cards, invitations, place settings, gifts for your parents, or a super-nifty custom guest book to have all your favourite people sign at your reception.
And there’s one more, super-important reason to have an engagement session. They’re heaps of fun.
Let me introduce you to Dale and Daniel. These guys are getting married on the 2nd of June, and I couldn’t be more excited to photograph their wedding. Despite being easy on the eyes, Daniel isn’t a fan of having his photo taken so their engagement session at the Spit in Southport on a sunny Saturday afternoon was the perfect chance to get him comfortable in front of the camera – and I let him keep his hat or his sunnies on for a few of the shots too, to ease him into it!
(Right after we took this shot a huge wave came up and swept all our stuff up the beach! Luckily Dale had an awesome waterproof beach bag, and it was totally worth the soggy knees to get this photo, anyway.)
You can’t predict the weather. Or so they tell me.
Vanessa and Marc won their sweetheart shoot in a competition I held on Facebook. We scheduled their shoot, chose a location and… it rained. The same thing happened with my other sweetheart shoot winners, and we rescheduled their shoots, but on Van and Marc’s session day the weather tricked us – it was a lovely day up until about half an hour before our session, when some massive storm clouds started rolling in. Having lived in London, it didn’t really phase Van and Marc, so we ploughed ahead and made the trek to the Fingal lighthouse for their shoot.
I do a pretty mean anti-rain dance, but it has its limits. We shot for twenty minutes before the rain started, and thanks to this gorgeous couple’s super-easygoing nature, we managed to get a bunch of really awesome shots in that time. Here are my favourites.
Sometimes last-minute shoots turn out great against all odds – you don’t have time to plan, you just work with what you’ve got… and what you’ve got turns out to be exactly what you need.
Aaron called me about his music promo photos one night – he needed them fast because his EP was set for release the next week. The following morning we went shooting in Bilambil. Aaron had some ideas, and I had some ideas, and together we made some really cool images. Here are my favourites.
(You can find Aaron’s music on ReverbNation and on YouTube)
In November I had the pleasure of spending a weekend with the incredibly talented Caroline from Mihaja Photography, her amazing team, and a great bunch of girls with the same hopes and dreams as I have. It was kind of like a massive sleep over with cameras! I learned so much, I shot so much, and I ate so much on this weekend that it was hard to pack up and go home. Here are some of my favourite images from the weekend.
Some girls wouldn’t dream of putting their wedding dress in harm’s way. It’s carefully selected, treated like it’s extremely delicate, worn for one special day with pride and then hung in the cupboard to be a reminder of one of the happiest days of their lives.
Kylie is not one of those girls.
Kylie is an awesomely eclectic mix of rockstar and country girl. When she asked if I’d be interested in helping her trash her wedding dress, I got seriously excited.
Trash the dress sessions don’t have to mean mud, fire and a ruined dress. They’re all about taking something classic and elegant (the dress) and putting it in situations where you wouldn’t normally expect to see it. It’s that contrast of environment and context that makes trash the dress sessions such an awesome opportunity for artistic, unusual and dramatic photos.
Kylie and I headed to a gorgeous property in Numinbah in the Gold Coast Hinterland to hang out with some curious horses, go for a dip in the creek and watch the clouds roll by overhead – in her wedding dress. We had an awesome time, and Kylie’s dress came out pretty much unscathed – just a trip to the dry cleaner’s had it as good as new.
