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Why Women and Babies?

Kelly asked me christian one of them was why women and I'm gonna answer that and then I asked kelly white babies um we differently uh shooting our own marketing demographic which is ironic but is it? I think you always going to be drawn to who you are? So many people have told this to me I can see you in your portrait I can see kelly in hers I look at those photos I just see it it's just incredible to me. I started to look at photographers and I know wedding photographers, baby photographers and I really see your cum reflected back in every single one of those photographs I see myself reflected in my own work now, so I think you need to understand that concept in order to be an amazing photographer. Well, okay, I'll idris amazing photographer I think kelly is an amazing photographer because of the connection she gets. I think I'm a great photographer because of the connection I have with the people but to be able to see it means we hold a space. So I was teaching the other day I was do...

ing a shoot and I was with nikki and she was shooting and I was shadowing here and she was posing a client and I was leaning in just like kelly was just saying I was talking her through it and I said to nicky like you're not getting her connection negative. Nikki was what are you talking about? I'm saying the same thing as you. I said he'd give me the camera and I whipped the camera off here. And in about one minute I just talked to here and I realized that the difference wass when nicky was up holding the camera, she was telling her more smile with your eyes, election mouth. She was giving her direction. But when I picked up the camera, my hope persona changed because I went from telling this woman what to do. And I almost showed here. So too may I felt like when I was watching her and nikki interact, they were connected, but when I took the camera, all of her connection to end towards me and I held her physical space with my physical space. So I wasn't just looking at the back of the camera and then looking through it, looking at the back, I instantly in this far away from her, I held her space immediately, and I held her gaze and I hit my camera here, and I was like, look at may and then push your chin forward, and I realized that, as I was speaking, I was almost hypnotizing her with my energy and my words to understand that I was holding her space suddenly there was nobody else in the room and she was looking at me and I got her into the position that she was in and she went past posing and doing what I was asking and who body language shifted into what I was doing because I was instantly marrying she was marrying me and all of a sudden now afterwards nikki and I were talking about and she was like, that was incredible because I saw her shift with you, she said, but what if I can't do that? But you can't do that because it wasn't the ueo is doing it it was what I was doing when kelly's on those babies she's holding the same space, did you notice that like she holds that space the mother was watching all of those mothers were standing there watching in all of them were, you know, very sort of watching this connection she instantly nurtured and then she just held it, and from the minute she set it down I watched her hands do this so she would see it the baby but she was still holding the space like she's holding the energy around them and then your hands never disconnected from them and then the second her hands pulled away to a camera it was like her whole upper body was still holding. It was like she was in a bubble and I feel like that energy that you connect with and that moment, however it's, with when you're controlling them, when you're posing them as a photographer, that that connection, that energy is a exactly what she's talking about the same way that she had a great message that mrs held her space, controlled it, manipulated it and moved it, but she had true intent when she did it, there was no fear there was no uncertainty. It came through experience in confidence, but more importantly, it came from a place of love because she loves doing it, you know? And she holds it doesn't make sense. Look, I just I I want to be out of explain that better, because I feel like if you're looking for that space is a photographer, whether it's, babies or newborns are women or couples or winnings, you can hold that space it's it's like an aunty and it's more than an in a suit of nous or control. I'm from a why women, I guess I looked at this and I looked at what we kelly's at night. I know her husband and I know her babies and I I've seen here home, and I get this is her world, and that she really feels this genre, and I feel my genera s so if you can really honestly tell me you don't feel what you shoot, I seduce you go and shoot something different because I feel my clients I feel that they don't like their arms and they don't like me here and they tied and they think they're old and I feel that I'm not good enough and I feel that from women and I want to show them it's wrong, so that is my why, and I feel like that why is so important in what I do? Because it just the same way when you're in a place of fear and scarcity, you reek of it, and I feel like I reek off their intent. I feel like I want you to feel like that now I don't want to photograph babies in my genre because I don't personally supervised doesn't, but when I look at every one of you woman sitting there about one with a child, I cannot understand why you would go to the bottom of the shopping list when I can make you look not only is beautiful issue could possibly look, but it's physically beautiful is your body could look with the child you love more than anything in the world, so that one day when your child is is forty years old you look at that photograph in your child will treasure it more than any photo they've ever seen of themselves. Start a campaign now could exist in photos for your children everybody do it everybody out clear do it this is an international campaign this is for women k the men come to the shoot because the women tell them tio whether they want to be the or not up to them, you know, but it's the women that want their babies photographed and they need to be in the photograph most poignant photograph of my studio is a mother with two girls people would walk in, see this image and it was a thirty forty five lad shot black and white beautiful shot of the man on my website people would walk in ago I want that and they would point to it and I realized when I saw it, why they wanted that because the mother looked incredible right now if you come into a baby studio and you just show me twelve babies and I've put on twenty pounds and I don't feel good about myself and I'm tired and when was the last time you had a good he cat or showered on your own? You know, remember those days when you went to the bathroom like by yourself and lock the door? You know? And so I look at that and I'm like, how could you possibly market to women if you don't put them in your advertising so if you start a campaign that comes from the heart called exists in photographs for your children in the next three days, you're going to find out how to do it even better. I need you to consider that right now, I also want you to go tonight and look through any baby shots you have been trying to fill up your twelve months, and then, over the next two days, you're going to start looking at your family portrait that include the baby and you're going to start looking at the maternity, and by sunday afternoon you're going to have a marketing campaign that is to every single woman who is going to get pregnant, who is going to have a child so that everyone that gets married, every woman who doesn't every woman who gets pregnant, any woman who has a child, any woman who's going to grow up and you're going to get clients for life. All right, so that's, my why woman and my speech exist in photographs, so I had two stories to tell one of them was this about twenty three years old? I was a very young photographer. I don't feel like I got a lot of respect because I was so young and, you know, twenty three years I was a bit see, I was certainly wasn't a smart twenty three year old, and I used to do this pitch on people back then, so nearly twenty years ago, I used to say to people, you know, one day, you're gonna grow up and you're gonna have your kids are going to be grown up, and you're gonna be in your fifties, and your children are going to say, this is my mom and what have you got off those photographs? And you happen to be with your baby, and it always worked. I did the same with brides to book a wedding iost always say the day after you're married, you have two things her husband and photographs, and you wanna hope they're both pretty good, because that's it, and they always is to just sign on the dotted line. That was my pole, so I'm twenty three years old, and I'm standing in my studio and, you know, twenty three year olds probably have not much of a key effect er and this woman just randomly ran up the stairs at the studio late one afternoon, looked to me like this, and she said, are you the photographer? I said, I'm one of them, yes, and she goes, uh, just saw your photos downstairs on the wall, and I just wanted to tell you that what you do, it's life changing I so I looked at her and I said, okay, why? And she said, this is my son, show me this picture who still gives me chills and she said he's hey died last year is twenty one united armed, so sorry, but she showed me a high school photo, like one of those bared blue backdrops with the marone sweeter in the gray high school uniform that we do in new zealand. It's just just I think you do them everywhere, but they're pretty bad. And she said, and this is the only photograph I have of him have it's like, you don't need to be reminded that you stopped time, and you don't need to be reminded that you should love what you do, but you do need to be reminded that in order to hold space, you need to have it and neither toehold energy, you need to have it towards what you're doing, and I need to value what you do. You need to understand why you do it, and I know I'm being a photographer for twenty four years, I've lost clients, I've seen them. Yes, I've seen that and it's very sad, but it reminds me constantly we had this incredible gift, and so that's, why my campaign? This weekend is to exist in photographs for your children because that's not about the baby you will photograph your baby a thousand ways from sunday and they'll be photos that you'll never print and they'll clog up your inbox and they'll clog up your you know your hard drives and you may never print them and that's another campaign we've got to get onto getting people back into printed photographs so that you can see them and you don't lose them elektronik clay but that existing would be the greatest pull for any mother that I have ever saying would you agree yeah now kelly has booked a family portrait session when she gets home because her children are how old nearly ten and seven and do you have a family portrait with all of your children and them I have one that was taken at a family barbecue and are you a portrait photographer that knows the value of what you do yeah bad kelly guilty okay what's the fastest way to advertise yourself is a family portrait photographer show them your family portrait so I suggest you do the one thing that you should do to honor your craft I suggest this week you and every other photographer out there go and find a photographer that it's the same skill sit in value issue and book them into do a shoot and pay them what they're worth because if you value that you'll pay for it if you don't value there I suggest you rethink what you do once you've done that I would either give back to that photographer or just simply ring them and sam a photographer I need to do this in the first thing I do to my portrait clients is whenever I photograph a photographer I say put my images in your studio and when they say I can't do that so you she can cause do you know what you say? I know exactly how you feel I've just done it myself and that too may is the best way to market yourself by getting your own beautiful portrait so then I said to kelly well why babies you can have that I don't even know what comes next you have the answer so no I mean next line um I've told you a while of babies you've seen why love babies if you watched my last workshop he saw how much I loved what I do but for me it's it's about family it's about having a documentation off their life and very soon being in that documentation with him by somebody else but um gosh it's it's really hard to put into words but a baby is born with the most pure heart and mind they have so much trust and they have so much love and there is nothing in this world that prepares you for how much you're actually gonna love them so being around that my god, it's such an incredible feeling like I get on, I have such a high when I am around brand new parents because of what they feel and and when you when you find that connection between them and you it's here, it's just it's incredible. So I am I love photographing my children, and I do what we were talking about advertisers and you born photographer, but being able to photograph my children and my family is one of the most important things to me because, um, we've had a lot happening in the last couple of years, and and my mother turned sixty, um in april this year, and she's recently got a second chance at life, which is pretty awesome, but we wanted to put a slide show together for her sixtieth birthday, and there was about a fifteen year period where she didn't exist in any photos, and I think to myself, what if she didn't get that second chance? And we didn't have that what you want? Like, what were your kids your kids like? There was just one of the weirdest photos of us. There were no photos of her, so in the last, probably since I've become a photographer, there are a million photos of her now. But there was such a long period of time where she just wasn't in the photos and it was when we were children. So what we're doing this week in getting this weekend and getting women and husbands to exist in their family photos it's just going to be cherished for life because when someone goes that's all we have left also you children don't care how fat you know they don't care if you've had no sleep and he looks like crib and your eyes yeah, I honestly can't tell you we were talking about being children we were talking about when you felt this separation anxiety from your appearance is a child and how old you were I remember thinking my mother was the most beautiful woman on this planet she glowed with love and I remember just looking at here is a little kid and thinking there was nobody more beautiful in the world then let him and and still to me now I feel that way like I look at her and I was like, I know your face I remember looking at you as a child and just wanting to be near you and how could you honestly feel that you weren't good enough to be photographed or not in a good enough place to be photographed crazy I love it when I get dressed up and I put makeup on my walk downstairs and my son says to me oh mummy look beautiful it's like um this thing in the world to may I couldn't care some when some stranger said it onto me on the street but coming from him like that's I mean in my other two side as well but coming from him is just incredible so I can show you some pictures of my family so this is what I love to do when I'm not photographing babies this's my beautiful georgia brown and she is thie one of the most complex human beings I know but she has thiss beautiful ability to just but you know just she's just can just sit silently so I wanted to a photograph like that and and what I showed this in my last workshop and that's my husband and my twin babies and that is when they were a seven and a half weeks old so it didn't have to photograph them or curled up imposed beautifully together I'd said to place them on my husband and that is one of my most cherished images kelly has really hot husband tio he loves if you're watching rob ah and these my grand parents have been married for sixties kelly won some beautiful awards last year not just within you born images but with her other family images which is so wonderful because she is an extraordinary for talk photographer and she documented her own family and won awards with them and I feel like the work spoke so beautifully to just here is a photographer emotionally as opposed to being the genre of newborn, and I really wanted her to show these to you because I needed people to understand sometimes we choose a genre because we wanna master it and because we know it's a very financially viable genre and because we do love being around those clients, but her skill and talent is very broad in opening up so beautifully and it's about to go a whole lot for that. So I think that's one of the most beautiful images, I'd be the same, um, and this is something I shot recently to help portray what my mother has experienced in the last couple of years tum to the power of photography is incredible, and she needed to tell her story, so we did this together, and she wanted people to know how she felt because it's very hard to put those emotions in towards she wrote them down, and the shot on the piece of paper was actually taken two weeks before she was diagnosed and my studio that was really quite bizarre that I had these images off her because she was in a place where she wasn't feeling right and she didn't know she was sick, so to be our to have done that and into a found out that she was sick was pretty incredible to be able to to go. Well, this is before. And this is after she looks pretty hot. The other shit on your head. And she was a beauty queen. Yeah, until you value what you do, nobody else will until you value what you do, nobody else will pay for it. So you must go and do this yourself. Do it with your children. Good to a repetition doable, but glasses in whatever you want. But do it now and then find the heart and soul and what you do and then master it. I would love to. I would consider before you did a newborn before you started to advertise newborn that you would actually do a hands on you. Born workshop to me children are a little bit more bouncy. The babies under twelve months, they seem to be a little bit more bouncy. Mom and dad are there, you know they don't seem is breakable. Ah, the newborn hands on workshop to me would be something I would do before I would start doing it because I've been a photographer for many years and not many things that I would consider doing. I would go and try any form of photography accepting you born before I did something hands on.