It started with
a bad backdrop.
Specifically, a roll of grey seamless with a coffee stain on it, in a church hall in Neutral Bay, in 2004.
2004 — the coffee stain
Priya was assisting on a childcare shoot and spent the morning trying to keep forty children out of the frame's bottom-left corner, where the previous photographer had put a mug down.
Halfway through she gave up, pulled a folded orange bedsheet out of her car, and taped it to the wall. The last eleven children were photographed against it. Those eleven are the only frames from that day anyone remembers.
She started Jellybean four months later with the orange sheet and two others.
Now — forty-one colours and counting
There are three of us. We photograph around fifty services a year across Sydney, and between us we can carry roughly a dozen colours into a centre on any given morning.
We buy a new one every time we see a colour that makes us stop, which is why there is a roll of deeply questionable chartreuse in the van that has been used exactly twice and was perfect both times.
Nobody here has a background in portrait studios. Priya came from music photography, Tom from food, and Nadia was a scenic painter for the theatre, which is why the colour choices are better than they have any right to be.
What we actually believe
Children are not beige
They're loud and specific and full of opinions, and a photograph that flattens all of that into a grey rectangle has failed at the only job it had.
Colour is a tool, not decoration
The right background makes a child's eyes brighter and their skin warmer. The wrong one makes them look ill. This is craft, not confetti.
Slow is the whole trick
Three minutes with a child instead of forty seconds. That's the entire difference between a photo they tolerate and one they're actually in.
The unglamorous paperwork
All three of us hold current NSW Working With Children Checks. We send the card numbers and expiry dates to your centre in writing before we turn up, along with our public liability and professional indemnity certificates.
We work from your consent list and go through it with your nominated supervisor before we unpack a single roll of paper. If a child's consent isn't clear, we don't photograph them and we come back once it is.
