Jenny Campbell is a busy photographer and designer who you’ll often see working away in the background at a local wedding or selling her wares with her two businesses, Clickybox and Culla Creative.

She left home to study multimedia web development and then moved onto another course, neither of which she enjoyed. She left those behind and worked for a few years in various administrative roles and in hospitality before finding her feet in an industry that she loves.

I didn’t do things in the way that people normally do them. They might normally go and do online training or a mentorship programme or second shoot for another photographer. Lots of photographers offer these services but I didn’t really know how to do that. I feel like it took me a while to get going and if I had done all of those things in getting to this stage, it might have been a lot quicker for me.

As the old saying goes, what’s for you won’t go by you and Jenny had a great few years interrailing around Europe and working in Argyll before she made the move to Newcastle and found the course for her: a Foundation Degree in Commercial Photographic Practice.

We worked with film cameras, developing the pictures and then we moved into digital photography. We also got to work with studio lights and various, different types of photoshoots. 

Jenny’s other subject of choice was weddings, a far easier market to tap into and what she spends most of her time doing these days. Obviously, there is a big difference between food and people and therefore, unsurprisingly, there’s also a difference in the techniques and methods for a professional photographer to capture these respective subjects.

“I wanted to go into food photography when I was in college. During work experience I worked on creating a foodscape – basically making a picture of a landscape from food – and it was used as the artwork for the side of a lorry. You’d see them often around Newcastle and it was pretty cool seeing a big photo that I had helped make on the side of those lorries. We also got to take the food home, which was mostly vegetables”

With food photography, you’re on your own. You’re in control of the thing that you’re photographing and you can decide how it looks. 

However, working with people, you can’t decide or really control how they are. So you have to work a lot harder to get them more comfortable in front of the camera. You have to have a certain level of charisma to be able to achieve that.

Jenny worked at her first professional wedding ‘being paid by a stranger’ in 2013. And comments that at a wedding: “it feels like a whirlwind and everything is happening so, so fast, but then when you see the photos you think ‘oh, actually’ there’s a lot of really good things here. Sometimes, you don’t remember those moments until you see them again. But after a while it just becomes second nature, you’re doing all these things, and you’re not thinking about how you’re doing them. Now I just know how to do them and so I can get the best out of a day.

Sometimes, you have to orchestrate moments and other times you have to find your scenario and anticipate how you’ll capture it. You try to get people talking or laughing or trying to find ways to make them smile. Natural smiles are a lot better to photograph than cheesy posing”

Apart from finding these moments and composing your image, editing is a big part of any photographer’s trade. Many photographers are hired because of their style, and we can’t forget about all the hours in a dark room they spend trapped behind their laptops. 

I try to keep everything consistent. People hire you for your style and it would be unfair to change this for each shoot. One of the reasons that they want to book you, most of the time, is because they like the way your photos look. You can’t take a booking and then deliver with photos which are completely different to what they expect.

“I had all the photoshop and lightroom skills from college but my editing process has changed since then. Your process changes and it takes a while to find your editing and photography voice”.

There are a lot of photographers in the Outer Hebrides and we all have our own styles.  They’re all great and they have their own feel. So, it’s not really a competition because everyone gets picked for their style and who they are, so there’s plenty of space for everyone.

Just like the island community spirit, the photography community is there to help and support each other. In lockdown, Jenny set up a private facebook page for all of the photographers and videographers in the Western Isles so that they could help each other during covid. The group was there to step in and offer support for any minor crisis, be that the cancelled ferry, the positive lateral flow test or a clashed date. Little did she realise that she would be leaning on this group for her own unexpected reasons.

Last summer, I unexpectedly had to be taken into hospital and had a wedding job five days later. I was able to count on the group to cover this wedding and got it sorted 12 hours before I was intubated! So, it has come in super handy for me, because I woke up the day after that wedding! If I didn’t have that group then they would have been without a wedding photographer on the day and no one would have known. I managed to get all my summer weddings covered with the help of others in the community.

Fortunately, Jenny is back to full health after a serious illness last year and is raring to get back out again with her camera.

I had to cancel 9 weddings due to ill health last year. I’m just glad that everyone got their weddings covered. After that experience, I highly recommend having critical illness cover as a self employed person. Even if you’re completely healthy, get critical illness cover!

It’s great to see Jenny back on her feet and it’s particularly heart warming to know that she was looked after by her fellow artists. 

It’s nice to be able to talk to each other. Community over competition is always healthy. We all tag each other or share each other’s posts online. It’s not about being all about yourself, other people are there too and we can help each other out.

Speaking about her plans for the future, the busy mother of two is spinning many plates. She is raising her young family, juggling Clickybox with her other business, Culla Creative and looking after her health. Jenny says that: eventually I’ll have more time for my own photography. At the moment the wee one is all up in my grill, but he’ll be going to nursery soon so I’ll have more time to focus on some other photography and art. I’m busy gearing up for the 2023 wedding season and can’t wait to get started.

We look forward to seeing your future work Jenny!

To book Jenny for your big day contact her hello@clickybox-photography.com and you can also follow her online www.cullacreative.com