Lifestyle Photography ( What Is ? ) :: Melbourne Lifestyle Photographers

I have quite a few posts buzzing around my mind at the moment .. posts about women, wives, and mothers that seemingly loathe themselves and thus leave their children with no pictorial legacy of their existence .. Mums that hire me and then have to be forced to get in the picture.

That swear they will ruin the images, that they are too fat, too ugly, have bad hair, a miriad of excuses.
It's probably you, I know it's me a lot of the time. Annoying, aren't we?

Someone once said to me that if we had a best friend that treated us as bad as we treat ourselves, we'd ditch her quicksmart.

Food for thought.

About a year ago I was under a fair bit of work stress ( as I am now, ha ha ) with too much work and too little infastructure to back me up.
I think I was suffering panic attacks as my heart would wake me up in the middle of the night beating out my chest.

I worried "what if I don't wake up in the morning?" What then?

And I thought about my work/life balance ( pretty awful ) and how if I did not wake in the morning, I would leave my kids with a memory of someone who seemed to be spending plenty of time with other people's families, playing with them, and then editing their pictures until 2am in the morning.

But it wasn't true, my family still had fun, we did stuff, but when i'm playing with my family, the camera stays at home. The camera is a work tool. And to play properly, to immerse, I needed to be sans camera, I needed to have my hands in the sand, and my feet in the water, my head in the trees and my arms in the sky.

I needed a photographer.

I needed someone to document my family, as they are now. 
Before I found more things to hate about myself, and before they got older, more handsome.
I needed a photographer to take pictures of us together, to provide physical evidence of delight, of being together. That we laughed!, that we played! :)

Plus, it's an excuse to have a little fun and do something different.

Lifestyle photography is just that. It's a living, moving organism, and no session is the same, and each is dictated by the family and their various personalities. Some families are crazy, and others more cuddly. Most have an idea of how they'd like to be portrayed, and it's usually doing the things they love .. coffee shops and icecreams, beach cricket and sandcastles, at home in the backyard, walking the dog.

Lifestyle photographers deal with imperfect situations, bad light, bad weather, and bad moods. It's not a controlled environment, and the photographer really needs to be on his/her game. Conditions change fast and you need to adapt on your feet, to be able to read the light and move with it.
The photographer will often get wet, or dirty or muddy to get your images. They usually go home exhausted.

But we didn't want a perfect studio look.  Even though classic portraiture can be very beautiful, we wanted to look like we imagined we might look if we stepped outside of ourselves and watched ourselves play and interact. We wanted real emotions, real moments, and we wanted to have fun and run about and have an adventure, not sit very still and smile at the camera.

And so it came about that we employed the very lovely Narrelle.

I've worked with Narelle a few times ( she's an amazing Wedding Photographer ), and she's got the right amount of fun and silly for our family. She's got a great pictoral style, and fantastic strawberry blonde hair. Not that we picked her because she looks like Julianne Moore, but hey, she does, and it's my blog, so i'm calling it.

Please enjoy these images of my family taken by Narrelle. They mean a lot to me and I sleep easier at night knowing I have them. I have big canvases of this session on my wall at home, and several others framed, and when I walk past them, they always make me smile. When my boys are being painful, they remind me TO smile. Good imagery isn't always about cheesy smiles, or your best clothes, it's about moments captured.  Together.  Now. 

As imperfect as you are, they love you anyway, you know. 

Thanks Narrelle Xxx