All about me!
Hello! I'm Rachael and I'm here to tell you more about me! This is not me in the picture. Its my hubby and daughter!
I'm based in Huddersfield. Huddersfield is where I met my husband and we now live with our beautiful daughter Elsie Lynn Lawson-Bake. Elsie is a lively four year old who keeps us on our toes. To me we are on an incredible journey: watching her develop from a tiny baby into a young girl, and I can't wait to see who she grows up to be. Since she came along I've changed my perspective on photography. I've grown to see photographs as a way to time travel, back to very fleeting moments when Elsie was younger and different. It has given me have a window on who we were then and lets me appreciate the little person she was. How her hair looked, her little hands and the things she liked doing. At one point she used to love worms. She'd find one in the garden and wouldn't put it back in the soil no matter what we said: it was like her new best friend! Photos also show me how much she's changed. She's taller, she's got more hair! The photos I have of her help me place her in a special alcove of my memory and let me look back in detail at any time.
Before Elsie Lynn came along I spent 20 years overseas living in different places, meeting lots of people, and exploring! I lived in Hong Kong, Russia, Thailand and Cambodia. I travelled in South East Asia, China, Canada and parts of Central Asia. Photographs of the time let me travel back to who I was then. To remember the adventures, the people and the excitement of meeting new people, seeing new places and having new experiences. I'm looking forward to sharing these photos and memories with my daughter when she is older.
In 2006 I gained my photography diploma from The Academy of Photography in Moscow. We studied in an old Soviet building, trudging through snow and ice to get there and we learnt using film. We shot Russian, American, British, subjects and we were taught by the best! (They really were very good tutors). One of our first assignments was to take a range of pictures of tomatoes. That was interesting! Try it!!
My style has always been reportage and my heroes are the early founders of Magnem. Henri Cartier Bresson and Robert Capa. This style is about capturing moments as they happen rather than posed, artificial type shots. The belief is that this is the best way to take a true picture of life. The job of the photographer is to line up all the visual and emotional elements of the moment and 'click' capture a picture of the second that defines that point in time. Cartier Bresson called it "The decisive moment". He was master of creating shots that were visually perfectly balanced yet also illustrated emotions and stories.
Soon after I graduated I moved to Hong Kong. I worked as a freelance photographer, I had my own video production company and I also taught English. During my time there I was able to travel extensively and took photographs along the way, trying to document some of the people I met and the places I visited.
Through out all my work I aim to employ one simple principle to my photos, and that is to put people at the heart of everything I do. I want my pictures to tell stories. I want to make you wonder about the people in the shots. I want to show you a part of who they are and their lives at that time and celebrate this in my pictures.
