By wedding photographers.
For wedding photographers.

And it's kinda f**king awesome.

Common Folk was borne over copious amounts of bread in the middle of Fremantle sometime in 2014. There was lots of note-taking, discussing, planning and brain-storming. Importantly, the bread was really good.

Succinctly, Jenna was like “Let’s get photographers to hang out and do awesome stuff” and Lauren & Glenn were like “Okay”.

Less succinctly, we wanted to create a community for like-minded, creative, common individuals so that they could hang out, talk shop, and try to understand the world of wedding photography. We thought there was a real void for this kind of community: one that didn’t operate on ego, longevity or status – but genuine sharing and enabling people to get together and share openly.

So we messaged about ten other photographers, some we knew, some we didn’t, to see if they wanted to come down south and hang out for a few days for a camp to share ideas, unload burdens, and drink f-tons of hot milo while we froze due to everyone’s inability to get a good fire going. It went crazy well, and plans for a bigger, much more open 2015 camp came about.

Soon after that we realised that a once-a-year camp wasn’t going to cut it, so we decided to steal someone else’s idea from another part of the world and run monthly-ish smaller events with a whole range of speakers covering a whole range of topics.

And that’s where we are. Four camps down. A heap of monthly events down. 300-ish attendees through the doors over last couple of years. And still finding it freaking ridiculous that we could turn a small idea into a huge active community of rad af creative folk.