I didn't plan any of this.

At high school I wanted to be a National Geographic photographer. I got told there's no money in the arts, and to pick something sensible instead. So I did the sensible things. Customer service. Tourism. Hospitality. Healthcare. Then I studied psychology and worked in mental health for a while, because apparently even "sensible" me couldn't stay away from people and why they do what they do.

Turns out that was the useful bit. Not a photography course. Not a camera. Years of learning how people behave when they're comfortable, how they behave when they're not, what they say versus what they actually mean, and the exact moment someone stops performing and just is. That's the skill this whole business runs on. The camera came later, it just gave me somewhere to put it.

Somewhere in the middle of all that I co-founded two ventures. Ara Creative Studios, where I taught small business owners how to actually use social media for their business and take decent photos of their own stuff, instead of white-knuckling it at 11pm the night before a post was due. And Elevate Mind and Business, a community for women in business across Otago who were sick of doing it all alone, because most of us were, and pretending otherwise wasn't helping anyone.

Then life did its own thing, the way it does. I became a parent. Worked out I was raising a wonderfully wired kid who does things his own way, not the textbook way. Became a solo parent. Started homeschooling. Rebuilt more than once, from further back than I'd like to admit. None of that was in the plan either, but it's the reason I don't do fake, and I don't do performance. I've had enough of both to last a lifetime, and I can spot them from a mile off.

So now I'm here in Milton, South Otago, working with people across Dunedin, Otago and Southland - as a photographer, yes. But also as the marketer, the content creator, the admin, the web designer, and increasingly the person other small business owners ring when they're stuck and need someone who's actually done the thing, not just read a book about it.

People first. Photography is what I do. Understanding people is how I do it.

I'm not chasing the Pinterest-perfect, sit-still-and-smile photo. I'm watching for the stuff that happens when people forget I'm there - your kid reaching for your hand without thinking about it, the laugh that catches you completely off guard, the look between two people who've been together twenty years and still like each other. Not staged. Not directed. Just noticed. Because that's what I've been doing my whole life anyway, I just happen to have a camera in my hand for this part of it.