My Story

I'm Emma

The Photographer Behind Whisky Creek Rural Photography - This Is My Story:

I grew up in the high country of the Southern Alps, on stations where the ute was my first form of transport and the pup pen was where I ran to the second I got off the school bus.

That was my childhood. Saving lambs and calves that came in orphaned, and nursing them back to health. Riding horses for the freedom of it. Always a dog — working or pet — somewhere underfoot. School holidays weren’t flights and hotels; they were camping out the back of the station, riding in the truck with Mum and Dad, shifting sheep and cattle, growing up alongside the pups, lambs, calves and horses that filled our days.

This life also gave me a love for the wildlife that shares this land. Falcons overhead. Herons standing by the lakeside. Spotting a chamois, tahr or stag moving through the landscape, or a fantail flittering along beside you as you work. Even on the hardest days, those small things were what made it all beautiful.

This has shaped everything about me. It’s why I went on to study agriculture at university. It’s why I care so much about the people doing this work — people like my grandfather and my father, who’ve spent their lives on the land, caring for stock that is their livelihood, not just their job.

But I was always a creative kid too — daydreaming, drawing, painting, seeing the world a little differently to most. Art was the one subject at school I never had to force myself into. And photography, it turns out, was already in my blood before I ever picked up a camera — my great-grandfather and grandfather both had strong passions for photography.

I found my parents’ camera when I was about ten, while they were away, and I couldn’t put it down. I was given my own compact Canon not long after, and I photographed everything my restless creative mind was drawn to. No plan behind it — just instinct. Years later I bought that same camera I used to steal off Mum and Dad, and that’s the camera Whisky Creek Rural Photography started with.

I’ve never done a photography course. Everything I know, I taught myself — through instinct, through trial and error, through actually living the life I’m photographing rather than watching it from the outside.

When I picked up a drone, something shifted again. I’d always loved the idea of flying and never had much chance to — and suddenly I could see this landscape I’d grown up in from somewhere completely new. From up there, you realise how small we all are on this floating rock. It’s humbling. It zooms you right out, and somehow that makes you more grateful for the ground you actually stand on, not less.

That’s what I’m chasing every time I pick up a camera now — not just a pretty picture, but that same feeling. The one I grew up with. The one that made me who I am.

So when I say rural images, for rural people — I mean it. I’m not photographing this life from the outside looking in. I’ve lived it. I still do. And every image I make is my way of handing a piece of that back to the people who know exactly what it feels like.