Thanks!

I haven’t been able to blog during our transition to being a family of 4, taking a day job and doing battle with a few different health struggles, but we’re still here!

Still shooting a select number of weddings (no more than 5 per year), still photographing families and individuals, still teaching our photography course, still busy with Heartfelt.

Still loving all of the various things we do, especially when we get to do them with these bundles of cuteness! Scroll down to meet Katherine Abigail, if you haven’t been stalking us on social media

Needless to say, it was pretty special.

• To put you out of your misery: no, Michelle hasn’t given birth to iArms 2.0 yet. That said, we’re less than a week off the official due date, our little girl has “engaged” (whatever that means!), and we’re ready to meet her aaaaanytime now. Follow me on Twitter if you want too much information when everything’s underway!
• Related: Michelle is now officially unemployed! She decided to do the full-time mum thing with baby #2, but I’m hoping she’ll find a little time for OFD later in the year … she has some mad biz skillz
• Josiah is two!
• My issues with depression and anxiety aren’t fully in the past yet, but happy pills have made for much progress, so… yay!
• We’re rebranding! Kinda sorta. I’ve been planning to launch a commercial photography brand for a while, and now that we’ve acquired some studio space, it’s finally happened! Luke Arms Photographer is now live, with its own logo, website, blog and Facebook page. As you can see, we’re specialising in a particular style of headshot photography, but LAP will also host some personal projects and fine art work eventually.
• Meanwhile, OFD isn’t going anywhere! We’re improving our processes, giving our blog a facelift (fancy new portfolio section coming soon) and shooting fewer weddings to make way for more family sessions, but in every other way, we’re business as usual
• Being the Newcastle coordinator for Heartfelt has been really special. Working with such a selfless team of photographers to deliver this profoundly valuable service to families is a delight, confronting as the work itself can be. Please continue to talk about Heartfelt with your friends.

That’s it for now!

Just a quick note to let you know that plenty is changing behind the scenes at one fine day, and that we’re not far away from starting to unveil everything we’ve been working on. Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, one change I *can* tell you about relates to our photography course.

Earlier this year, I was approached by URCreative, who were looking for a tutor to deliver some of their photography courses in Newcastle. I gave it some thought and decided that working with such a large, well-established course provider would be good for me (no more course admin/marketing/development!) and for my students (less costly courses, more options, better resources).

So, I won’t be running “say no to cheese (the course)” anymore. Instead, you can register for a URCreative course in Newcastle by clicking here (you’ll probably want to check out the course info here too). At the moment, I’m the only Newcastle tutor, but that will probably change in the future.

And to pretty up the post, here are two photos from a certain event last month

Proof:

Meanwhile, I’m sitting at Sydney airport on my way to photograph the Singapore half of Sondha and Peter’s wedding, so I thought I should post a few images from their big day in Newcastle.

PLENTY more to come