There’s a drawer, or a shoebox, or a folder in someone’s attic that holds the evidence.
Grainy 35mm prints. The ones from the nineties with the white borders and the date stamped in orange in the corner. Your mum in the backyard, squinting into the sun. Your mum at the kitchen table, mid-laugh, unaware. Your mum actually in the photo — present, real, unhurried.
At some point, your kids are going to go looking for that equivalent. The photos where you’re actually there.
The mum behind the camera
Most mums I work with are the ones holding the phone. They’re documenting everything — first steps, lost teeth, lazy Sunday mornings, the way the light comes through the kitchen window in autumn. They’re building an archive of their family’s life, frame by frame.
And they’re almost never in it.
Not out of vanity. Not because they don’t care. It’s more that it feels easier, or more natural, to be the one watching. To be the keeper of the record rather than the subject of it.
But here’s the thing: your kids aren’t going to want to look at the back of your head holding an iPhone. They’re going to want your face. Your hands. The particular way you hold them. The ordinary Tuesday of it all.
What we actually lose when we don’t print
We’re not going to run out of images. We’re going to drown in them.
The average family has tens of thousands of photographs sitting in cloud storage, on ageing phones, on hard drives with unknown passwords. Most of them will never be seen again. Not because anyone meant for that to happen — just because that’s what digital images do. They accumulate and disappear at the same time.
Film is different.
A roll of 35mm film yields around 36 frames. Thirty-six moments, chosen carefully, exposed once. There’s no burst mode. No deleting the ones where someone blinked. There’s a slowness to it that produces a different kind of photograph — one that feels considered, even when it’s documenting something entirely ordinary.
And when those images are printed — held in your hands, framed on a wall, slipped into a drawer — they stay. They don’t require a password. They don’t need a software update. They’re just there, the way your mum’s photos were just there.
Once a year, in May, I offer something small
Every March, I open five spots for Slow Roll Motherhood — a short, unhurried film session at your home in either Torquay, Jan Juc, Geelong, Barwon Heads, or Ocean Grove. Sessions take place in May, around of Mother’s Day. If you’re on the Surf Coast or surrounds, this one’s for you.
One roll of 35mm film. Your home, your light, your actual life.
It’s not a mini session. Not really. It’s more like a quiet half an hour hour where you get to be in the frame for once — with your kids piled around you on the couch, or sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, or doing exactly whatever your Saturday mornings look like.
I’m not there to direct you into something that doesn’t feel like you. I’m there to notice what’s already there.
Five spots. Each year, every March. Check current availability and dates here.
About printing
This session doesn’t include prints — but I won’t leave you to figure that out alone.
I have a lot of experience with printing albums and frames through my favourite Australian family-owned lab. I’ll walk you through the options after your gallery is delivered. Getting your images off a screen and into your hands is part of the point of all this. I’ll make sure you know how to do it well.
The long view
Your kids are going to want to know what you looked like. Not posed, not filtered — just you, in your house, in your life, loving them.
That’s what this is for.
If Slow Roll Motherhood resonates, you can find details and current availability here. Spots are limited to five each year, and this is the only time I offer anything like a ‘mini session’ format.
It also makes a genuinely meaningful Mother’s Day gift idea — if you have someone in your life who is always the one behind the camera, this is a way to put her back in the frame.
If the timing doesn’t work this year, bookmark this. It’ll come around again.
Kristen, aka Bobby Dazzler Photography is a film photographer based in Torquay, on Wadawurrung Country, on the Surf Coast of Victoria. I shoot exclusively on 35mm and medium format analogue film, and I work with families and artists who want images that feel like art, like a memory.
