Penarth Nub News aims to support our community - promoting shops, businesses, artists, charities, clubs and sports groups.

We are profiling some of these in a feature called 'Up Close in Penarth'.

Today, we zoom in on local photographer Katrina Dimech as she makes her return to the studio.

We're beginning to reach the stage where lockdown is something we can look back on rather than endure.

As we all reflect on that strange and hopefully bygone period, some will do so with a sense of pride while others would sooner forget the entire episode.

Katrina (or Bean) Dimech, owner of Penarth-based photography and videography business Shutter Hire, falls firmly in the former camp.

She has emerged from isolation a more skilled and versatile photographer and business person. Thankfully for her company, early signs show that the town is as eager to get back in front of the camera as she is to get behind it.

Penarth through and through

Penarth is Katrina's birthplace, her home and her muse. The town's most iconic locations - the Pier, Cosmeston Lakes and Alexandra Park - serve as frequent backdrops to her shoots.

By the time of her first day at Stanwell School, Katrina had already developed a burgeoning obsession with photography.

Her father, a self-employed motorcycle salesperson, was an amateur photographer. Katrina would use his cameras from an early age. It therefore came as no surprise to anyone when she enrolled in a film and video production degree at University of Derby.

Also a natural progression was Katrina's decision to start her own business rather than work for someone else. Following their father's footsteps, Katrina's brother and sister are also self-employed as a plumber and musician/Welsh translator respectively.

So when she struggled to find employment after graduating, Katrina was prepared to take the plunge and start her own wedding photography and videography business.

After her son, Oliver, was born in 2013, she decided to train in newborn photography. Diversifying in this way enabled her business to thrive - a lesson that would prove invaluable when the pandemic struck.

Overcoming the challenges of lockdown

Photography is an inherently intimate craft. Katrina strives to capture emotions and personality in her photographs - something social distancing makes incredibly difficult, if not in possible, to do.

To make matters worse, weddings were delayed and studio photography became an illegal pursuit.

Thankfully, Katrina's pre-pandemic diversification into the commercial realm kept things ticking over with the help of government grants.

But Katrina is not the type of person to rest on her laurels. As early as May 2020, she had launched her doorstep photography service, capturing the spirit of lockdown in Penarth.

More recently - upon noticing that people were clearing out their attics and discovering old photos and videos - she purchased the necessary equipment to digitise film and photographs.

"It didn't make me a huge amount of money but it kept things floating and helped me to help people," she tells Nub News.

"I adapted quite a lot through lockdown. I didn't want to sit around and do nothing because I can't be that person. I have too much energy and I didn't want to be dipping into my savings. Plus my husband, who's a carpenter, couldn't work because people didn't want him in their houses.

"We were having a bit of nightmare, so I found ways through my photography to diversify."

Katrina also seized the opportunity to practise different editing software and says her pictures have improved as a result.

Emerging from the pandemic

Despite her "amazing" lockdown, Katrina has been relieved to find business booming upon her return to normality.

She was concerned that new mothers would be too cautious to venture into the studio. In reality, she has never been busier.

Katrina thinks a local baby boom is responsible, even though the data is currently unclear on whether more babies were conceived during the pandemic.

"It's crazy," she says. "I think because when people didn't have much to do in lockdown there's been a load of pregnancies. There wasn't much better to do and there's been a definite increase in babies being born."

Due to developing new skills over lockdown, her photos are looking better than ever.

Even before the pandemic, Katrina prided herself on client safety. She received professional training on how to safely shoot babies, where she learnt safe poses and editing techniques that enable the mother to hold the baby's head up.

Now, she implements track and trace, steam cleans thoroughly after every session, never does a shoot back to back, holds outdoor sessions whenever possible and always wears a mask.

"It's important that people feel safe and it's been really positive to see that they do."

Find out more at the Shutter Hire website.