Ellie Do Studio · Sydney commercial photography, videography and social media production

Does your venue
look better in person
than it does online?

Then you are in the right place. Seven years across creative and growth marketing, for government, institutions, venues and brands, so I read a place from both angles: how it should look, and what the pictures have to go and do afterwards.

Based in Sydney and available anywhere. I also work in digital marketing and growth operations, which you can see at portfolio.elliedo.com.

Royal Flying Doctor ServiceSix commissions, 2024 to 2025
Charles Darwin University, Confucius InstituteSix events, 2023 to 2025
Hilton DarwinSince 2020
Encore Pilates & WellnessFour years

Events and Conferences

Conferences, galas, exhibitions, festivals and launches. Shot to be usable the next morning, while the event is still worth posting about: the room before the doors open, the arrivals, the service, and the faces in it.

The RFDS National Digital Health Conference came in six days from first contact to delivered film, with one small revision.

2014 to 2016 · Phu Quoc, Vietnam

Watching from the pool

Two years as a guest relations supervisor at Salinda Resort, through the island's first rush of international tourism. Then in 2015 the resort brought a crew over from Singapore, and I ended up in the shoot. That is me in the water. I spent the whole day watching how it actually worked: the monitor, the light being shaped, a director moving people a foot at a time until the frame was right. It was the first time it occurred to me that there was a craft behind a picture, and that somebody had to run it.

2016 · China

The first camera I held was borrowed

A trip through the villages the following year, and somebody lent me a camera for the day. This is the first time I properly handled one: photographing a child outside her house in a Miao village, and later standing with the people who lived there. I understood none of the settings. I shot far too much, most of it badly, and spent the evening working out which frames had worked and why. Within an hour I knew I wanted to keep doing it. I did not own a camera for another three years.

2017 to 2019 · Hanoi

A producer before I owned a camera

Days went to Microsoft's account at Tek Experts, running quality and global critical situation communications across APAC, the US and Europe. That is where the stay calm while everything is on fire habit comes from. Everything else went into pictures: borrowed cameras taken up rivers and onto bridges in fog, and still nothing of my own. I also produced two tourism films in this window, a commissioned job for a government body. Producing meant I never touched a camera on either, and that was the point. Two shoots spent watching a professional crew work: how a production is run, and who calls what.

2019 · Australia

Three of the last five thousand

I moved here in my thirties for an MBA, with two full years of tuition ahead of me, five thousand dollars to my name and a good part of that owed to my mother. I spent three of it on this camera. It was not a sensible decision by any measure, and I made it in about a day. After five years of using other people's gear and handing it back at the end of every shoot, this was the first one that was mine. I could finally practise on a Tuesday.

2020

2020 · The year everything stopped

Laid off, and learning on the job

Six months in, COVID arrived and I was laid off, with a degree still to pay for and a country I had only just moved to. So I hustled. I took whatever client work I could get, and used every job to learn something I could not do the week before: a room I had not lit, a dish I had not shot, an edit I had not attempted. It did not feel like progress at the time. Most of what I can actually do now was built in that year, on other people's jobs.

2021 · Charles Darwin University

Paid for by both hustles

A saffron side hustle and the freelance camera work covered the tuition between them, two things running at once for two years until the degree was paid off. Neither on its own would have been enough. By the time I walked across that stage the camera had stopped being the expensive decision I made in a hurry and started being the thing paying for the other one. It is the only graduation photo I have where the person in it already knew what she was going to do next.

2021 to 2024 · Darwin

The camera came to every job

A run of marketing roles across Darwin: Hilton, Chartair, the City of Darwin, and the Territory's destination marketing. The title said marketing, and I did the marketing. But I kept a camera in the bag for all of it, because there was always something that needed shooting and no budget to hire it out. A community event. A partner interview. A staff highlight. New visuals for Monday's promotion. At Hilton that meant the property photography across a four hotel cluster, shot in-house. Doing both taught me what a marketing team does with a photograph once it has one.

2020 to 2024 · the other side of it

Knowing how it feels from the front

I spent a good part of those years on the other side of the lens: a promotional video series for Charles Darwin University in 2020, speaking for Chartair at an industry award in 2022, and picked to represent Vietnam as an extra on the NCIS Sydney shoot at Pee Wee's at the Point. Being the one who is lit, miked and asked to look natural teaches you something you cannot learn from behind a camera. Almost nobody I photograph is a model either. Now I know exactly what I am asking of them, and how to make it quick.

Somewhere in there

It stopped being only photographs

Somewhere in the middle of all that the shoots turned into productions. Scripting. Lighting a room properly for an interview. Directing someone who has never been on camera and is quietly terrified of it. Cutting the thing afterwards, and knowing while I am shooting what the edit is going to need. A photographer who can also run a film day is a different proposition to a business, because it is one person holding the whole thing rather than three suppliers, three quotes and a coordination problem that lands back on the client's desk.

2025 · Sydney

The long way round, on purpose

Change Rouse Hill was the first Sydney work on this site, and it made the pattern impossible to ignore. Most businesses do not need better looking photos. They need content that earns trust, holds attention and eventually turns into bookings, and a plan for what to do with it after week one. The photography was never the point. It was always the bridge to that. The desk in this picture is where the second half of the job happens, and it is the half that most people never see quoted.

Ellie Do

Does your venue
look better in person
than it does online?

Wellness

Change Rouse Hill

Encore Pilates & Wellness

Nobody is a natural in front of a lens

Events and Conferences

Royal Flying Doctor Service

Charles Darwin University, Confucius Institute

Brand and Product

Hospitality

Coverage, not a single highlight

The same
rooms, in
motion