I'm Una Zhu, a photographer in Vancouver.

I spent the first decade of my career on commercial sets in Shanghai, shooting campaigns for brands including Apple, Nike, L'Oréal, Oakley and Waldorf Astoria. Big crews, and a shot list that had been signed off three weeks earlier. I learned how to plan a day properly and how to deliver on a deadline, and I still work that way.

What I noticed over those years is that the sets I looked forward to were the ones with children on them. A child who is enjoying themselves cannot fake it, and a child who is bored cannot hide it either. That makes them the hardest people to direct and the most honest to photograph.

I moved to Vancouver and narrowed the work down. Most of what I shoot now falls into three jobs that look similar from the outside and are not.

Headshots

For young actors and models, where an agency has a standard to meet and the photograph has to be a true likeness of your child this month, not last spring.

Play sessions

For families, where nobody is asked to pose and I stay far enough back that your child forgets I am there.

Campaign work

For brands who need the children in their advertising to read as actual children rather than small adults holding a product.

I work in English and Mandarin.

Alongside this I take corporate photography and video through unamedia.ca, and I keep a personal documentary practice, most of it made in Shanghai.

If you are trying to work out which of these you actually need, send me a message. I will tell you straight, even if the answer is that you do not need me yet.

Get in touch

Short film

Shanghai to Vancouver

A short piece on how the work changed after the move, and why most of it is now pointed at children.