Happy New Year from Me and Mine!

After a year of posting images of other people’s happy-ever-afters, I thought I’d sign-off for 2019 with some images of my own. I’m conscious I spend a LOT of time talking to people about the value of creating really great memories of our families, and so earlier this year I took my own advice and got my second shooter, Andrew Caldwell, to create some memories of me, my husband, Brad and boys James (3) and Edward (5). Even though I’m not someone who especially loves being in front of the camera, I know it’s important for our family to feature in the memory bank as a unit.

My style (or perhaps it’s best described as my passion or my photographic value system) is to shoot candidly. It’s a style also described as ‘photo documentary’ or sometimes ‘photojournalism’. Even though there’s always a place for images that have some direction from the photographer and are more posed and looking to camera, I believe it’s the unscripted photography that allow us to revisit the past in years to come and be reminded how we felt at that time, not just how we looked. That’s why I asked Andrew (who doesn’t normally shoot families) to do this shoot because as a second-shooter at all of my weddings, his creativity depends on getting undirected moments. While I am keeping the show on the road and attracting attention to myself, Andrew is quietly looking for what we call the ‘moments between the moments’ and when you have a young family that’s what you want to remember. Me and my boys spend lots of happy hours at the Eskdale river mouth and when they have grown up and left home the joy and fun of those good times is what I want to remember. I also asked for the edit to be black and white - firstly because the simplicity of the colour palette puts the focus on the story and also it suited the day which was a little overcast and not especially showy at sunset.

Thanks to Andrew for these special memories. You can see more of his work at www.ankh.co.nz