2025 Wrap-up

It’s been quite a while since I posted a yearly wrap-up here. I’ve been somewhat occupied with a change of direction since 2021 as I transitioned away from offering private client shoots, into teaching pet photography full time through Unleashed Education. But over the last few years, through being caught up in an endless cycle of admin and pouring all my time and energy into teaching, I’ve also realised the importance of maintaining my own interests, working on my own projects and keeping my creativity and style progressing.

If you’d like to catch up on what I’ve been up to over the years since my latest (2019) yearly wrap-up, my Top 10 blog posts over on the Unleashed Education blog share my favourite images from the year with some background info and a little personal news update. You can view these for 2022, 2023 and 2024, plus my latest instalment of Top 10 Photos of 2025.

So now let’s take a look at what 2025 brought on a more personal level, with a bit of business stuff mixed in too. In the name of keeping it real, I’ve shared mostly behind-the-scenes phone photos, with just a few “proper” shots thrown in at the end.

January kicked off with summer storm season, and it didn’t disappoint. Hot, humid days, afternoon thunderstorms with plenty of thunder and lighting are exciting - except when you have a storm phobic dog! Fletcher is NOT a fan, but we manage. It does take the fun out of it, but hey at least there are rainbows afterwards! This was taken with my drone, looking east from my place, after one such summer storm.

Summer isn’t all doom and gloom though, it’s perfect for beach visits and I took advantage of some gorgeous weather to take my furry terrors - Fletcher, Opal and Enzo (Mr Pickles) - to a huge off-leash dog beach on the aptly-named Sunshine Coast in February.

I promise, this is the last time I’ll mention the weather in this blog post…

Things really ramped up in March, when after a week of ominous build-up, a tropical cyclone crossed the coast right through my home of north Brisbane. Cyclones don't often come this far south in Queensland, but Cyclone Alfred had us in his sights! Apart from creating a huge mess, the only real serious damage at our rural property was a small tree fallen on our chook shed (no chickens were harmed) and a very large gum tree that fell on our property power lines, snapping a power pole at the base and leaving us without power for two weeks while it was replaced.

In April, I headed off to New Zealand to spend two weeks in beautiful Arrowtown with Team Unleashed (consisting of my business partner Craig and me, plus Fi (our systems developer and teaching assistant) and Bex (our social media manager).

We worked our butts off filming new educational content and preparing and planning for the year ahead in Unleashed Education. We also managed to fit in a few personal photo sessions with our fave models and some new furry faces - you’ll spot a few favourite shots from these sessions over on my Top 10 of 2025 post on Unleashed Education.

As with anything relating to Team Unleashed, we of course ate some incredible food (most of it made by the other three as I cannot cook to save myself), wandered through trails with stunning autumn foliage, had a very cold swim in Lake Wakatipu, drank plenty of delicious craft sour beers, had a few visits to our favourite pub in Arrowtown (shoutout to the Fork and Tap), and generally laughed a lot and enjoyed each other’s company. It’s pretty special when you can number your workmates among your best friends in the world!

While I was away, with impeccable timing, my special little lady Opal managed to do herself a mischief and basically destroyed her knee. She had to be unique of course, and instead of injuring the more common cruciate ligament, she instead ruptured the collateral ligament and did some pretty major damage to the supports of the knee.

She had two surgeries while I was in New Zealand, and when I came back another complication came to light. Her leg had been bandaged too tightly prior to surgery and had cut off circulation to her foot, so she had some tissue death and ended up losing half of one toe and doing some serious damage to her other toes. Poor little love! I did take daily photos of her recovery from this, but I’ll spare you the gory visual details.

I spent the next couple of months nursing her through the surgery recovery and the foot trauma - it was lucky I had no overseas trips planned and was able to spend the time helping her recover - which involved lots of carrying her around! Once her foot healed, we did hydrotherapy twice a week for months, which really helped in her recovery. I'd like to say she's made a full recovery, but her leg has lost a lot of lateral stability, so we'll need to be careful with her - no more frisbee and ball - and nothing that involves scrambling, twisting or launching off that leg. She turned 10 in November, and I'm thankful that she had a good 9 1/2 years of being a complete maniac before we've had to dial her back!

In July, my husband and I headed off to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand for to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. No photography, no dogs, just a well-deserved, regular holiday, for once! We spent a very enjoyable week eating amazing Thai food, visiting temples, zooming through the surrounding mountains on a scooter, and getting lots of awesome massages. Bliss!

2025 was our fourth year running (plus entering and judging) the International Pet Photography Awards, but for the first time, I was also asked to be a judge in two other professional photography competitions. The Australian Photographic Prize judging happens online, live broadcasted through YouTube. I was also asked to judge at the NZIPP Iris Awards - my first live judging experience!

The IRIS Awards were held in Christchurch (conveniently, where Craig lives) over three days in August, and I was given an initiation of fire by judging three categories I was entirely unfamiliar with - Creative, Nature and Student - which was a little daunting! I absolutely loved the experience though and really had some fun with it, especially the Student category which took me back to my days as a student at college studying photography, gosh, that was 25 years ago now!

I also entered the Awards, receiving my first ever Gold award, then was named an Australian finalist in the Animal category. Honestly, I was NOT expecting to win, so at the Gala Awards dinner when they called my name as the winner of the 2025 Australian Professional Animal Photographer of the Year, I was understandably a little shocked.

You can read more about my awards win here.

Craig and I also presented a live workshop at the NZ Photo Show which followed on from the IRIS Awards, and later ran a Masterclass: a dog photoshoot at the beach, of course! Education is what we’re all about, so it was awesome to share that as part of this experience.

A day later, I headed off to what feels like my second home, Arrowtown, for a week of snowboarding with two of my best friends to decompress from all the excitement. It turned into a brilliant little break filled with plenty of laughs, a gorgeous walk on a newly opened trail with another friend and her dog, Benson, and as always in this place, lots of great food and tasty beers. We even scored a couple of snow days. I also managed to find new snowboarding pants in both purple and teal - totally on-brand with Unleashed Education. A pretty perfect way to round off another trip to one of my favourite places with some of my favourite people.

September was spent at home, gearing up for the last (and biggest) overseas adventure of the year. On the 1st of October, I headed to the west coast of Canada (which involved many hours spent in planes and at airports) to run three back-to-back pet photography workshops with Craig, and the rest of Team Unleashed (Fi and Bex, with Craig’s husband Chris cooking for us), in beautiful Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

For the entire month of October, we did not have a one day where we weren't totally flat out. After the workshops were wrapped up, we travelled from Cape Breton to Halifax for a few days of R&R - which of course did not actually involve any rest, but did involve even more photo sessions at the beautiful historic seaside locations of Lunenberg and Peggy’s Cove (where I got lots of cuddles from an absolutely stunning red merle Aussie).

Needless to say, I came home a month later with a mountain of editing to get through. The workshops went super well though, the locations were stunning, resplendent in their autumn foliage, and I captured some images that I'm very happy with. If you want to see more about what we got up to (and more photos of actual dogs!) check out the recap of our Nova Scotia Unleashed Workshops here, with a few of the images taken there featuring on my Top 10 of 2025 post on the Unleashed Education blog.

Back home in November, it was a whirlwind of wrapping up our Unleashed Challenge courses for the year, continuing to onboard our new full-time customer service specialist (welcome to the Team Unleashed, Hinckley!) and attacking the absolute mountain of editing that had stacked up over the year, including sessions from back in April.

We also decided to finally get rid of our swimming pool, which was old and had leakage issues, replacing it with a deck extension and spa. We also had an old dam restored! Lots of earthmoving took place between these two projects and they both looked like complete disaster zones at various points throughout the the process, but we’re out the other side now and reaping the rewards of a nice full dam (thanks Mother Nature for coming to the party right on time) and a new spa - although the surrounding deck is still a work in progress.

After I got back, I also had an urgent end-of-life photo session with a beautiful German Shepherd called Princess who was owned and much loved by the furry terrors' groomer, Ali. It was very sad, but also heartwarming to be able to create some lasting memories for her family to comfort them through their grieving process. I’m pretty bad at getting behind the scenes photos at sessions, so here’s a couple of the sneak peeks I have sent through to Ali of Princess to tide her over while I get the editing complete.

My final shoot of the year was with my friend Sammy and her Brumby (Australian wild horse) - Winter. She was the horse that began Sammy’s journey into rescuing, domesticating and training Brumbies. Sammy is a psychologist and works as an animal assisted therapist, using her horses, dogs, chickens and goats (she has quite the menagerie) to work with neurodiverse young people to improve their quality of life.

We trailered Winter out to a beautiful pine forest where I usually photograph dogs, but having a horse and her human there gave this old favourite location a new lease on life for me. It also really opened my eyes to how much I enjoy working with people and their equine companions, so this is something I am planning on doing more of in 2026.

Some personal goals for 2026 include getting back to doing my one-second-everyday project (I took a break from this in 2025) and building compost bins and a shade house for a new veggie garden project. Also - since 2026 is the Chinese zodiac Year of the Horse - more horse related things like buying a new float, riding my horses more, and shooting more equine photo sessions.

Stay tuned, and I hope you'll follow along with my adventures!