The Kristy Story

**My photography makes a lot more sense when you know where it came from.**

I’m Kristy, the photographer behind The Auld Romantics.
Most of my work involves photographing people in wild places, using natural light, a fair bit of imagination and absolutely no expectation that you should know what you’re doing in front of a camera.
The way I photograph has grown out of the places I’ve lived, the things I’ve loved, the people I’ve met and the way I experience the world around me. Being outside has always been important to me, long before I understood quite how much it would influence the work I create today.
Looking at my photographs now, so many parts of my life are reflected back at me. Australia. Scotland. Art. Modelling. Motherhood. Nature. Imagination.
It has taken me a surprisingly long time to realise how closely all of those things are connected.
**And it turns out the story starts a very long way from here. In Australia.**

The Pioneer - Frederick McCubbin — It started with a feeling

I grew up on a farm in Western Australia, where being outside was simply part of everyday life. It was also where my imagination seemed to come alive.
As a child, I loved the Australian bush painters, particularly the Heidelberg School. Paintings like Frederick McCubbin’s *The Pioneer* (*pictured*) fascinated me, along with the poems and stories of Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson.

It wasn’t really the painting style that stayed with me. It was the feeling.

Those pictures made me imagine a life beyond the scene in front of me. Who were these people? What had happened before that moment? What might happen afterwards? The landscape was never simply a background…

… it was part of the story.

Looking at my own photography now, I can see that influence quite clearly. The landscape may be completely different, but I’m still drawn to people in wild places, warm earthy colours and photographs that leave you wondering about the story beyond the frame.
There is still that same pull towards atmosphere, emotion and the sense that we’ve arrived in the middle of something.
**Different country. Different landscape. But perhaps I’ve always been looking for the same feeling.**

Beautiful Scotland

Scotland eventually gave me a completely different landscape to explore, and photography gave me a reason to get out into it.

At first, it wasn’t really about photographing people. Something happens when I put a camera to my eye. My normally very busy brain goes quiet. Everything else seems to disappear and I start noticing what’s actually in front of me. The light through the trees. Weather moving across a hill. Colour, movement and all the little details I might otherwise walk straight past.

My children came with me on many of those early adventures, so naturally I started photographing them too. Not posing for the camera, just being children. Playing with sticks, jumping in puddles, exploring and getting muddy.

Over time, people began to find their way into my landscapes more and more. And looking back, I think I understand why.

Putting someone into a landscape gave me a way of showing other people what being there felt like to me.

But the landscape is only half of the story.

Long before I became a photographer, I spent time on the other side of the camera as a model. That gave me a very different understanding of what being photographed can feel like, particularly as a woman.
Being in front of a camera can make you suddenly very aware of yourself. Your face, your body, the angles you like and all the little things you’ve decided are somehow wrong with you.
That is why photographing women means so much to me now. **There’s a little bit of me in the way I see them.** I photograph in the way I would want to be seen. Not picked apart or perfected into somebody else, but interesting, beautiful, strong, romantic, funny or powerful.
Sometimes we create something completely natural or we invent another character entirely. What matters most is that you look at the photographs and see yourself through slightly kinder eyes.

I photograph women in the way I would want to be seen.

This is how it feels to me

Being outside has always quietened something in me. With a camera in my hand, I stop thinking about everything else and simply notice what is around me.
Photography gives me a kind of mindfulness I find difficult to achieve anywhere else. **The photograph matters, of course, but so does everything that happens while we're creating it.**
**For me, photography has never just been about the picture. It’s about how it felt to be there.**

And that brings me back to YOU!

All of those things have found their way into how I photograph people now. The landscape, the light, the imagination, the feeling and, most importantly, the person standing in front of me.

Your photographs don't need to look like anyone else's. You don't need to know how to pose, arrive feeling confident or become a different version of yourself.