The in-demand Wollongong wedding photographer up for a global award

She's a three-time winner of the Wedding Choice Awards, a three-time runner-up of coveted specialist industry awards the NSW ABIAs. and has been shortlisted from a worldwide field to be included in Rangefinder's Top 30 Rising Stars competition.

"It's all still kind of up in the air at the moment but it's the biggest one yet and winners are announced in early March," the woman better known as Translucent Photography said.

Born and raised in the Illawarra region, Lucy began her photography journey as a child before she launched into the industry professionally in 2011.

Her passion and drive to capture weddings saw her photograph a whopping 112 weddings in 2022. She tried to avoid burnout the following year and did cut back on wedding but still racked up 130 sessions overall.

"At one stage I shot six weddings in a week, looking back I honestly don't know how I physically did that," she said.

She is still trying to balance it all out but has since cut her weddings to a general average of two to three a week, but sometimes extending to four.

Her love of photography emerged from an early age, having grown up playing with Kodak disposable cameras while travelling in the back of her dad's LandCruiser on the many trips to remote regions of Australia.

Sometimes being taken out of school for six weeks at a time to explore new destinations with her parents, Lucy said her love of capturing the moment began on those outback trips.

"For each trip I was usually given three cameras.

"We were gone for up to six weeks at a time, so I had to ensure that what I did capture was worthy of the exposure, so I still had space to take more, should something else come up along our travels worthy of a shot," she said.

Lucy's career kicked off when she was 18 and became a nightclub photographer at a club in Sydney, she'd occasionally take photos at a few smaller gigs in Sydney too and festivals such as Groovin' the Moo.

She first opened up her business, 'Translucent Photography', in 2011 as a bit of a side hustle during her uni days - news flash she didn't study photography. She actually undertook at Bachelor of Science.

At first Lucy mostly focused on family shoots until she branched off into weddings and elopements in 2015. The next year she moved back to her home town in NSW after graduating from university in 2016 and began pursuing photography more seriously.

By 2019 she became a full time photographer, going into it leaving her "safety-net" job with a "sink or swim" attitude.

The business morphed into a husband and wife team the following year, when Dean joined Lucy, just in time for the "busiest years of our lives".

"He's the ying to my yang, he's cool, calm and collected and he's become the admin assist that just helps cull back all the photos and makes sure I'm focused on our coffee fuelled editing and office days," she said.

"We play off each others strengths and feel that we really do have the best job in the world, with the best part being that we get to do it together."

Lucy's style has changed and grown as she's adapted and trialled new things, undertaking workshops for professional development along the way, but one thing that's always been her main focus, is capturing authentic and candid moments.

"I know how awkward it can be, being in front of the camera, which is why I want my couples to be relaxed and not look like they're in their school photos or practising their posed smiles that's in every photos on their mum's fridge," she said.

Lucy said she achieves that by getting acquainted with the couples prior to the wedding, developing a relationship where she gets to know the quirks of the couple, so she can be familiar with them and make the entire experience feel as natural as possible.

"I'm not a choreographer, I'm not there to put on a stage production and it's not a Broadway performance. I like to scale it back and focus on capturing the couple at their best," she said.

Lucy said her top tip to anyone being photographed was to "trust your photographer".

"I have some couples who in their planning process think they have to go to Pinterest and put together a shot list. That's not me, I'm there to capture your day as it feels authentically," she said.

"The biggest advice I can give to anyone who is getting married or photographed is to literally trust the process and be yourselves, because the photographer is going to work with the conditions and work with that."

Lucy said she also encourages her couples to brave the weather, especially since a lot of her weddings in the past year had featured unfavourable conditions.

"We've had a lot of rain in the last couple of years and it's the one factor you can't plan or control so I tell my couples 'it might get a little wet but if you stay inside than all of your photos are going to look the same'," she said.

"We had this wedding in December in Berry and it was essentially a cyclone and the couple just embraced it.

"The bride's hair was in a beautiful soft low bun and by the end of it it was an absolute drowned mess but her face could not have had a bigger smile on it."