Story is Everything: The Art of Storytelling Photography with Michelle McKay
In this episode of the Unfiltered Podcast, Courtney and Kylie sit down for a chat with
Melbourne based in-home newborn & young-family photographer Michelle McKay.
Michelle McKay is a master storyteller. From her background as a high school English teacher to her work as an in-home newborn photographer, story is at the heart of everything Michelle does. She’s also one of the speakers at the upcoming Unfiltered Retreat in the Blue Mountains from August 8th to 11th and we are so excited to have her on the podcast today, sharing her thoughts and expertise about creating compelling storytelling images for yourself & your clients.
We chat about…
How the practice of documenting life, what it looks and feels like, has become Michelle’s life’s work and acts to ground and anchor her to real life.
Michelle’s struggles with time management and how changing her perspective on time has made a difference not only to her life but to how she documents it as well
Michelle’s background in English, poetry and teaching, and how that fuels her obsession with storytelling
How Michelle approaches a session and prepares her clients in order to tease out their own unique story
The strategies & visual devices Michelle uses to shape individual stories within larger, more universal ones
What Michelle wishes she’d known when she first started as a photographer
And how finding your voice is not something that happens overnight
Some of the books Michelle mentions in this episode are:
4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
The 4-hour Work Week by Tim Ferris
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
Michelle McKay is a photographic artist located in Geelong, Australia.
Her in-home photography business specialises in all things newborn and young families, but her personal work and lifelong obsession is documenting ‘the beautiful ordinary’, catching memories and making an honest and artful record of real life, while inspiring other photographers to do the same.
She’s the host of the We Are Memory Catchers community and membership, teacher of Telling Stories, which is a 15 week course that explores the specifics of how to make more intentional and artful storytelling imagery, and the creator of the Memory Catcher editing presets.
Michelle’s aspiration is to make art from the ordinary, so that over time, that which now seems mundane and routine will be remembered and cherished.
