WS – How did your photography career start?
SL – Strangely enough, my very first encounter with a ‘real’ camera, before I even knew anything about photography, was shooting windsurfing back in the mid 90s when we first went to Maui!! Ironic, huh! In the early 2000s I took a photography course and both Paul & I have been shooting professionally for over 15 years. We started with film, spending hours in the darkroom before moving over to digital and knuckling down to learning Photoshop!
“ I can’t stress enough the importance of a correctly exposed and composed image even before the digital file loads up on your computer screen ”
Long story short in 2011 we ended up on Maui for three months and by the end of it I had hundreds of windsurfing photos which I didn’t know what to do with so after a little thought I decided to set up an interview website whereby I would feature my images and interview the windsurfers. The website was a success and by the next year I set up Fish Bowl Diaries on Facebook (www.facebook.com/fishbowldiaries), little knowing how popular it would become and how well known Paul and I would become within the industry for our work. Depending on what I’m posting, our weekly reach on Facebook is anything from 20,000 to an incredible 375,000.
Over the last 15 years we’ve received different awards. In 2009, I won the Annabel William’s Photographer of the year award, 2015 saw Paul & I receive a 3rd place at the WPPI (largest International Wedding & Portrait organisation) awards for a surf wedding and we have both been shortlisted in the final 10 of the Hasselblad Masters awards as well as shortlisted a few times in the WSL Big Wave Awards. I also won the Societies Sports Photographer of the Year 2015 (for an image of Bernd Roediger during the Aloha Classic 2015) and runner-up in the Societies Travel Photographer of the Year (for a Surfers at Jaws shot). Paul won the Societies Photographer of the Year 2015. He was also Runner up in Societies Advertising/Commercial Photographer of the Year (for an image of Marcilio Browne). The Societies (previously known as SWPP) is one of the largest photography organisations in the UK.