Country-girl Megan’s keen photographic eye

Megan Rutherford doesn’t have artistic antecedents.

The science-trained country girl though has recently discovered a native talent for beautiful, rural-based photography.

A finalist in the Central West Photography Competition with her portrait “Shearing Time”, she found her love of art almost by accident.

Mother of three young girls, Cassie, 5, Georgie, 4, and Kate, 2, she also runs with her husband the cattle and sheep property “Sugarloaf”, near Blayney.

“I’ve always lived on a farm, I grew up on a sheep and cattle property at St George in Queensland,” Megan explained.

“I haven’t always had an interest in photography, I worked up until my first child was born.”

A trained scientist working in agricultural research in Orange, her creative talents only took off after she became a mother. “I come from a very science-minded lifestyle, I studied science at Armidale at UNE (University of New England),” she said.

“We’re on a sheep and cattle farm at Fitzgerald’s Valley and, being at home with the kids, I just felt I needed something to fill the gap. I was surprised, very surprised, I’m a research scientist with my background very research-based.”

Unlike many in the creative fields, she doesn’t have an old poetic great uncle or water-colour painting grandmother who she can trace her artistic yearning to. “Not at all, my family are farmers, I’m a fairly black-and-white sort of person.

“There’s no artistic background in my family at all, my family are very farm-like people,” she said.

“But it was something that I decided to get into to fill the gap in my life, and I found that I really liked the creative nature of it,” she said.

As well as her prize-winning entry in the Regional Development Australia-sponsored competition, this year she also put together a calendar for 2022 with a very rural theme. “It’s a bit like the Elder’s Calendar and I was a bit nervous about how it would go,” she said.

Still only 32, she also runs a photographic business specialising in touching family portraits with a rural theme.

“Because of my farming knowledge, I now do family sessions in rural settings, just trying to capture them naturally – the aim is to not be so structured,” she said.

“I think people appreciate that I come from a farming background myself, and they’ve become quite popular.

“It’s good, because it’s also a chance to fit in with my lifestyle – to keep up with my tiny kids as well,” she said of her girls, all of whom are at home at the moment due to the lockdowns.

She admits her business, Megan Rutherford Photography, which she only started about 12 months ago, was a bit of a leap into the unknown.

“I sort of didn’t know what to make of it, but it’s been going pretty well. I really love the creative process. I love the fact that I’ve captured them in a way that they like, it makes me feel great,” she added.

Megan was also recently involved in an NSW Farmers Association project to educate school children about the importance of farming to our society. “The aim was to bring farming into the classroom. The fact that I come from a farm helped, I think,” she said.

Like most of us, Megan is just waiting for lockdown to lift so as to be able to get back to her niche business of realistically capturing farming families on their properties in the modern agricultural age.

“I’m happy to do photos of people in their farms and show them as they would like to be portrayed. Most like the fact that I have a farming knowledge, I just think that really helps,” Megan concluded.