I love photographing in my client’s homes. It’s the place where they are often the most comfortable at, and it’s reflected in the relaxed, real life, documentary imagery. This was my first photoshoot after the lockdown, and what a joy it was! We started with a couple of more posed images of the whole family, and after that they just went about their normal day, and I captured their life just as it was – perfectly imperfect.

I’ll leave the rest to my client who wrote this beautiful and humorous account of our time together (because life with kids is unpredictable and not everything went to plan – but we rolled with the punches!):

A week after my baby was born Antonina came to our home to document this special time in our lives. The “plan” was to hang out at home and have Antonina get memories of dinner time, bath time and bed time. I use the word “plan” loosely because it all went tits up!

We decided to braai because that’s always fun – not so much on this day. Why you might ask? Well because my 4-year-old, despite us telling him a thousand times not to, thought it was a good idea to touch the braai – while there was fire inside 😑

So, instead of laughing and eating and playing we have operation “save the child’s hands”. Also, the baby would not stop feeding so I was confined to the couch and kitchen which never makes for super fun pictures so yeah 🤣

Despite all of this I love our pictures because they’re life. They show our life at that exact moment in time. When I look at them I’ll remember how Eli spent the summer running around naked, how tired I was, how overwhelmed I was, how wonderfully supportive my husband was and what a blur this time of our lives was. Life is messy. Life isn’t perfect and that’s why I love these. Thank you Antonina for finding the beauty in our chaos 💛