Lisa Ball: Mother of two and president of the Motueka Camera Club

August 4th, 2011
By David Armstrong

The realisation in her teens during her first job that she had a good eye for light and colour has led Lisa Ball into an emerging business career, as well as her favourite hobby, as a photographer.

Lisa was instrumental in setting up the Motueka Camera Club two years ago, and her creative ideas and efforts along with her shutter-happy friends led to the club being in the position of capping its membership at 40. Doubtless other sporting and hobby clubs in the district would be very envious.

Lisa was born in Auckland and arrived in Motueka when she was 11 years old, her parents having tired of the big city rat-race and wanting a nicer family life. They moved into her great uncle's orchard (apricots, nectarines and peaches) at Pangatotara, and Lisa went to Ngatimoti School.

At school she made friends easily and kept good grades without too much effort. Her preferred subjects were more of the creative type - cooking and sewing - rather than academic.

After the standard voyage through High School, she left school and went flatting in Motueka at the age of 17. She "fell into" her first job at the Motueka photo lab called Photo Optics, which is now the AMI shop. Initially she did the standard counter work but soon moved up to operating the photo processing machines.

"That sparked my interest in photography," she says. "Seeing people's photos and seeing how they'd taken them, and learning about the colour how to adjust colours, darkness and lightness and so on.

"We had to read every negative that went through the machine - it's all automatic these days, but you used to sit with your hands on three buttons, and as the negatives slide past you on the screen you'd go 'minus one' or 'plus one' to add density or remove some darkness, or to adjust colour - adding yellow colour to counteract too much blue, and so on.

"Basically you had to visually read it and adjust as you were going, and you had to get quick at it obviously because you couldn't take all day to do one film."

This was the first of several photo laboratories. Next was a year at the photo lab set up in the just-opened New World supermarket, followed by Pan Pacific Cameras in an arcade in Nelson. Then, seeking a change in scenery and to explore big city life, she moved to Auckland when she was 21. She worked at a small and unchallenging photo lab for two years but got poached ("the man said I had a lovely smile") to work in a large and busy photocopy centre.

Lisa ended up working for him for eight years, finishing up as manager of the business. "It was an awesome job. The copy centre did printing, copying, T-shirts, anything you could think of printing on. We did business card design, booklets, business fliers, lots for larger corporates which was new for me.

"I ended up learning a lot about computers obviously, the design side of things, computer software, quoting and invoicing, things I'd had little to do with till that time."

She bought her first good SLR film camera while working there and began seriously getting into photography as a hobby.

When she was 24 she met cabinet-maker Alan and they married four years later in 2003. They decided that when they were ready to have a family they would move back to Motueka because she loved the area as a place to live and raise children. "Fortunately Alan fell in love with the place on his first visit too, so that was good!"

After buying their Hau Road house, they returned in 2005 and family making began: Cameron was born in 2006 and Jamie in 2008. In the meantime Lisa worked at a pharmacy on the camera and photography desk, and for a while at the Warehouse.

With Jamie past the infant stage, she began thinking about how she could contribute to family finances without going back to work, by making some money out of her passion. Two years ago she was asked to do the photography for a wedding, which went so well that she did two others for people within the same family. Word of mouth has given her about a dozen wedding jobs since then.

She does the Photoshop work on her images in her small "back shed" office, and sends the files away to get printed.

Portrait work is her next venture. Shortly she is doing a fundraiser with the Motueka Toy Library in which parents can have their children's portraits taken at a good rate with a percentage of proceeds given to the library. Lisa is an enthusiastic supporter and volunteer member of the Toy Library.

"It offers a fantastic service. It's run by volunteers, relying on community members and mothers of children to keep it going. You hire toys for two weeks and take them back, and it's a good way of testing different ones on your children. Great for grandparents to look after visiting children. It's a definite gem in our town."

Lisa says she has plans of converting more of the back shed beside her office into a studio for portrait work, though that depends on finances and how long she and Alan plan to live where they are. "I think that since the closure of Pixie Photos in Nelson there's a real market for a photographic studio here," she says. It would be the first such facility in Motueka.

She has also done some commercial work such as photos for catalogues and brochures as well as fashion shoots. She also did a talk with the ACORN group teaching parents how to take photos of their children.

Her biggest challenge to date has been founding the Camera Club. She saw an article about Alan Bilham (an accomplished photographer who has retired to Motueka) where he was talking about starting a camera club, so she contacted him and helped him get it rolling. Lisa became vice-president at the first election meeting and now she is president.

"I'm told we will have a few new members at our next meeting, so we'll hit our target number. We decided to cap membership at 40 because that's all our preferred rooms (at SeniorNet) will comfortably take, and also we don't want it to become too impersonal." Not bad for two years!

Lisa has been very busy helping to organise and run monthly meetings, which include small tutorials on aspects of photography, followed by the judging of images submitted by members for that month's type of photos. Judging is done on the night, thanks to Alan who is training member judges (one of whom is now Lisa).

What with the monthly field trips and outings, "I'm pretty busy," she laughs. "I don't get much spare time these days, that's for sure. I'm thinking of passing on my position to someone else for next year, so I can look after Cameron when he starts school."

Lisa's medium-term goals are centred on building both a strong family life and building a satisfying and thriving business.

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