I believe that to succeed in this “industry" we need to fully engage our heads and our hearts, and Sonya's post demonstrates how truly engaged she is. It was about the albums she’s been keeping of her two daughters since they were born, and it reminded me of another album that Heather made years ago. So here am I, hand on heart too…

Twenty-one years ago we hired a professional photographer. It was our daughter Adrienne’s birthday. Stephen was coming home from Australia with his fiancée Sonya to meet the family. Heather's Mum and Dad had long passed away, and my parents were getting on. It was a perfect occasion for family photos.

The photographer, our good friend Rodney Ellmore, came round for lunch, we dressed up (a bit) and he took pictures of us around our house and garden.

Rod was a perfectionist, and we loved his photos and were willing spenders. We bought a series of four large matching black and white prints in simple frames to display down a hallway, a large family group, and a lot of prints that Heather made into an album. Plus more for the rest of the family. One of them I took down from my mother’s wall when she died.


A photo of Heather and me, twenty-one years younger, is on the wall behind my desk. The album is beside me as I write.

Can you imagine how important these objects are to me?

The album is unique, literally. Heather never made another like it. It has marbled endpapers handmade by an Auckland artist, and a forest green library buckram cover with a matching marbled inlay. The photographs are individually tipped onto black hand-sewn, hand-torn pages in the traditional style.

The following year Queensberry released its first pagemount album featuring the same subdued green and black look, and for some years they were our most popular colours. Other colours have long since taken their place, but our album still looks wonderful. Fashionable no, classic yes. So does the commercial pagemount version. So do our framed prints. The printing looks as good as new.

Without any doubt our album will be handed down to our children and grandchildren, as will our parents’ albums, and their parents' and grandparents’.

Right there is the beating heart of our business. In that album, and in our relationship with photographers like Rod, who understand that it’s their job to create timeless photographs that reflect the love, pride and relationships that bring us together as families. Not just for our selves, but for our futures.

I’m not being at all morbid when I say that Mum passed away five years later, Dad six years after that, and our good friend Rod just a few months ago. But looking at those photos makes me remember how I felt that day. I remember the bamboo outside our door, and our rickety old outdoor furniture. The rips under the Indian cotton throw on the couch Heather and I are sitting on, where Adri’s beautiful Doberman had dug himself a hole! Mawgan is long gone too of course, and Dad’s Jack Russell Toni.

In one hand I hold those emotions, in the other recognition that these are the powerful motivators behind the business of professional photography. Love, significance, family pride. The desire to remember and be remembered. As Van Morrison says, "the beauty of the days gone by."

I hope you love what you do. We do.

Cheers, Ian