It started with a fashion designer.

I'm Adeolu, and the fashion designer is my wife. She makes clothes, and I photographed them — the pieces, the fittings, the models wearing them. I thought I was helping out. What I was actually doing was learning fabric: how beadwork catches a room's light, how a gele holds its shape, why the same lace reads one way at noon and another at six.

Her customers noticed. One asked whether I'd photograph her wedding. I said yes before I'd properly thought about it. Then someone else asked. That was the whole business plan.

I still work the same way: close attention, no interference. I won't line your family up and ask them to say cheese. The pictures people actually keep are almost never the posed ones — they're the buffet queue, the aunties laughing at something nobody else heard, a father watching his daughter from the edge of the room. I would rather notice something than arrange it.

A lot of what I photograph are Nigerian celebrations, which mostly means I know how the day really runs — that the gele will take longer than anyone planned for, and that the dancing starts later and goes on longer than the schedule says.

Based in Orange, NSW Central West, and regularly on the road across NSW.