I photograph people.
That’s the short version.

I’m a Gold Coast photographer drawn to people, performance, and images that hold onto something real. Portraits, couples, fire, creative and intimate work. It took a winding path here.

It started in my last year of school, when a Panasonic Lumix turned up for Christmas and I decided, with an unreasonable amount of confidence, that I was a photographer. It couldn’t shoot RAW and it couldn’t change lenses. It was enough to make me obsessed. The business was called D’Amour Photography. It made no money and I learned in public, the usual way. The eye came first. Everything after is me working out what to do with it.

How I got here

My first real step into the industry was Mark Morffew Studios. I started by assisting, moved into shooting, and ended up running the studio. That is where the foundation came from: how to read a face, how to shape light so someone feels good in it, and how much of this is really about making the person on the other side of the lens comfortable. It is also where I learned the business of it. Selling photography. Running a studio as a working business and not just a craft.

It is where I fell for studio light, too. I bought my first strobes while I was working there and that kicked off a long obsession with Bowens-mount lighting. A slow, deliberate build of softboxes, beauty dishes, gels, every modifier I could justify. All of this is still in rotation today.

Then I went back to freelance and shot a bit of everything while finding my direction again. Portraits, model portfolios, events, even a season of Santa photography. In 2020 I talked my way onto the media team at Elements Festival with two cameras on a harness and enough front to walk into the briefing like I belonged there. That turned into years on the road: Rabbits Eat Lettuce, Dragons Dreaming, Earth Frequency, whole seasons of them, all night, in the worst light a field can throw. It is where the low-light craft stopped being luck, and where most of the people I still work with came from.

Hundreds of festivals and nightclub events in, that chapter is done. The work at events now is different: AV production crews and the performers on their stages. At events, not for them. That side runs through After Dark Media. This, under my name, is the personal side: portraits, couples, creative and intimate work, with room to slow down and build something together.

How I work

I’m a little introverted, and I think it’s made me a better photographer. Being photographed can feel vulnerable, even for people used to it. I don’t expect you to turn up knowing how to pose or how to be on camera. We ease into it. I’ll guide you when you want direction and give you space when that works better. Some people want clear posing. Some just need enough trust to settle in. Both are fine. The frames I care about most happen once that first layer of self-consciousness drops, when it stops being about taking photos and starts being about making something that feels like you.

It scales, too. It can be one camera, one light, one person. Or up to whatever the brief needs, with real production through the people I work with: lighting through Krank’d, LED screens through Onesol Productions, theming and styling through Events Fantastic. Same eye on it either way.