elopement & intimate wedding photography

Sixteen years, and it took me half of them to work out what the job actually was
It started with my boys and a car full of sports bags. Footy, touch footy, cricket, hockey, repeat. I photographed all of it — not just mine, everyone's — and handed the other parents pictures of their kid mid-air at the end of each season.

Somewhere in all that I realised I could take it further. Not long after, a friend asked me to photograph her wedding. I took the pictures to a market stall and booked two more by the end of the day.

Then came the twenty-firsts. I made each of my sons an album covering every year from kindergarten to graduation, photographs and notes side by side. I watched people turn those pages at the party, go quiet, and say it out loud: I wish I had this. That was the moment I understood what I was actually making. Not photographs. Something people would want to hold in thirty years.

Which didn't stop me doing what everybody does. I said yes to everything. Every enquiry, every budget, every date. I owned better gear than I needed and I was technically fine and photographing almost nothing. The images were sharp and correctly exposed and they didn't make anyone feel much, including me.

What changed wasn't a workshop. It was noticing that the frames I loved from every wedding were the ones nobody asked for — the half second before the laugh, the hand finding another hand, someone looking across a room when they thought nobody was watching. So I started building days that made room for those instead of scheduling around them.

That's when the planning became the job. Timelines, locations, permits, weather. Not admin — the actual work. Most of what makes a photograph possible happens weeks before the camera comes up, and nobody told me that for years.

Then came the ABIA Queensland Wedding Photographer of the Year. It didn't change how I worked, but it changed who found me. Being seen and acknowledged by the industry meant couples took the work seriously before they'd met me, and doors that had been shut for years opened in a matter of months. I hadn't expected that, and I won't pretend it didn't matter.

Now it's ten to fifteen couples a year, on purpose, and I've stopped chasing the ones that aren't a fit.

And this is the part I didn't expect at all. After everything, the thing I most want to do is give it away. Storytelling sessions, one-to-one mentoring, and the Venture Folk Retreat — and now taking all of it around Australia. Partly because I had to work most of it out alone and it took far longer than it needed to. Mostly because photographers who lift each other up make better work, and there's enough of the other thing already.