City snappers go bush
Couple taking photography gear on road trip to regions
IF YOU see a vintage Sunliner caravan bouncing down a dusty track sometime in the next year, chances are you’ll be looking at a couple of photographers on the trail to experience the people, landscapes, colours and textures of the real Australia.
It’s an excursion to capture the diversity of love, life and landscape to hopefully be featured in a picture book.
Brisbane couple Sid Coombes and Callena Brenchley form photography business Daisy and the Duke, which specialises in wedding and portrait photography.
Their journey will be shaped and punctuated by rural weddings and family portraits that are being booked along the journey, which starts southward on a lap of the nation.
The couple positively bristle with excitement about what they will find.
“Our first wedding is in a very small town, Coonamble, and in a lot of ways we are more excited about that than a lot of the more metro weddings we have booked along the way,” said Sid.
“The couple are from a very large property, but there are only about 15 people living in the town. So, it’s going to be people from all around the district finishing up work and coming to the wedding.”
Capturing the country wedding will take them to a new place in terms of their photography, as the clients want to include a sense of location, so cattle and dust and open country will all be a part of the shoot.
Callena said it wasn’t just about weddings, however, but capturing the diversity of life.
❝ We want to do a few projects based on the people we meet, and what they do for work, or their lifestyle.
— Callena Brenchley
“We want to do a few projects based on the people we meet, and what they do for work, or their lifestyle, and just get to know everyone along the way,” she said.
Sid said it would also be about the landscapes.
“You have the deep greens of tropical rainforest in North Queensland, the red of The Pinnacles, lavender fields down in Tasmania: such a massive change in colours, textures, and environment,” he said.
At present, the couple, in their mid-20s, are busy with prep for the journey. They’ve ditched both a swag of possessions and their metro Brisbane apartment and moved in with their parents.
They have been busy with a refit of their 13-foot 1960s Sunliner, Lilah, to mix simple living with a functional work studio.
“We have been very city. We lived in a small apartment in West End, with lots of other apartments literally being built around us,” Sid said.
“And when it came to the editing side of photography, well, it was always in a dark office. We always joked about how it would be nice to edit next to a river, or near a beach and have that beautiful view.”
Sid and Callena invite anyone seeing the caravan to knock on the door and say hello.
“We are really looking forward to those chats in a pub, where people point you towards something you didn’t know about,” Sid said.
“We know how important local knowledge is, and we’d rather explore a beautiful waterhole that someone local has told us about than just go off what you find on tourist sites or Facebook.”
If you are interested in catching up with the pair on their journey, you can track them down via daisyandthe duke.com.au.