I am quite a creative person, but I get impatient with many aspects of  “being creative.”

I love other people scrapbooking, I can’t bear the packing out and packing back process, so I have never scrapbooked.

I love the idea of preparing lavish cakes and cupcakes.  But I know a lady who I can buy from which is far easier than me making anything.

I am creative.  Unfortunately I am about as lazy as shit drying in the sun.

I love photography.  I really do.

I started doing shoots on weekends in 2011, and as nervous as I was about fucking them up, I enjoyed walking away with the bits and pieces of people’s lives.  I did it for about a year.  It was time-consuming.  It tapped in to my greatest fear, which is meeting new people, engaging with them, and then the stress of producing something, which I could fuck up by just setting the wrong aperture.

I liked that I captured a moment through a lens.

I liked being there to see stuff.

I liked the fact that sometimes I saw details that other people might have not seen or disregarded.

For me photography is a hobby.  Even when I charge a fee it barely covers the time it takes me to go there on a weekend, and the babysitters bill.

So photography was never about the money – it is about something that makes me happy inside my soul.

Of course it appeals to my social phobia, and being able to be somewhere, but at the same time hide behind a lens.

The part about photography that is not always realised is the editing time.  A shoot of 2 hours, can often result in 4 – 6 hours editing.  When you are doing it as a hobby, and not a form of income, it can really be a challenge to find the time above work, kids, alcohol, chocolate easter eggs, drugs, reading, trying to start a multi-billion rand business with my metal giraffe, and finding the time to sit and do edit reams of images

My lovely, gorgeous and probably one of the people I love the dearest in the world – Judith Cross – agreed to do a Maternity Shoot with me some time ago.  We did the shoot on the Saturday, it was fkn hot, and she was a star.

I dragged her around, and at some point she was pole dancing with a tree, which I thought alone was worth a prize!!

On Monday she was puking and throwing blood and faeces all over the delivery room, as she pushed Benjamin Cross in to the world.

Today (Benjamin is nearly at first year University) I was sitting going through some of the images, and it reminded me how much I enjoyed being part of someone’s life from the other side of the lens.

There are so many fantastic/wonderful/talented photographers out there, and really I cannot compete with their skill and dedication levels.  I am a total newbie.  I total almost-set-my-SLR-on-automatic-when-the-going-gets-too-tuff.

I really do miss it.

I really do.

Old wordpress site which I have not updated in ages:  http://celestebarlow.wordpress.com/

I took some photos of The Stiletto Mom some time ago – and I was really happy with how they turned out.