Well probably not your normal route into wedding & portrait photography. My parents are and were professional photographers before me - although their speciality was adventure photography, specifically mountaineering in the high mountains of the European Alps, northern Spain and Norway. Of course as you might imagine my childhood involved having a camera and also climbing, a lot! We were always up to something at weekends, whether it be rock climbing, mountaineering, mountain biking, skiing, kayaking, canoeing.... or combining some or all of the above - and as you I get wel imagine also, my parents house is teaming with slideshow reels, photo albums and even posters and catalogues from outdoor companies that employed them as photographers.
Back to me though - So I used to take photographs of all my adventures. I was always the kid in school who had the camera with her, and forged ahead with new technology like digital cameras back at the beginning of the 2000’s! I was even the photographer for my school year book.
The last couple of years of school saw me working for a charity we ran from our school, taking used computers to Africa to install them in schools in the poorer areas of South Africa. I took my Nikon F50 with me with a big zoom lens and a tin full of slide film and returned with some of the most amazing images. I also helped out my parents when they photographed one of the daughters of the late Terry Nutkins’ (log the ‘Really Wild Show’) wedding in the highlands. I had been in school on the west coast with his children and so I was there to assist my parents carrying bags, loading batteries and assembling tripods.
Again when I came to university in Aberdeen I joined the mountaineering club (as you would expect!) and always had a camera with me capturing my adventures around Scotland and the Alps.
I should maybe also add in here that my degree was in art history followed then by a masters in Photojournalism, which might have also had some influence on my photography too...just a little!
After I had a baby back in 2014, I then started photographing her like she was going out of fashion! And it’s really just gone on from there.
2016 one of my best friends told me she was getting married and had looked into photography but they couldn’t afford the prices... she asked if my parents might be able to help out. At that point I got myself a decent camera and thought i would ’help out’.... as it turned out on the day, my parents took a backseat and I need up being the one who took the majority of photographs... and it just went on from there - a few months later I photographed my cousins wedding at a farm... and was paid in a pair of rather fabulous Irregular choice shoes... and then I started actually managing to make money from my passion!