Hello! I'm laura, and i take photos of beautiful stories.

So lovely to meet you! I'm Laura Johansen, photographer and graphic artist behind Alaura Imagery & Design, and I have a deeply set passion for fine art photography and storytelling.  Finding that glimmer of artistic perspective in a meaningful moment, working with people and elements in a natural, honest and authentic way, and helping to immortalise a feeling from a treasured memory is what makes me feel alive.

I come from a long, long family line of professional story-tellers. From my mother's dramatic and creative writing background, to my father's long line of musicians, composers, lyricists and genealogists, in one way or another the creative telling and preserving of family stories goes back for as many generations as we know. I love that! I feel that my perspective in the visual art of photography is my own little niche in this rich history of storytelling.

Lucky enough to call many places my "home," I was born in Brisbane, Australia and grew up with a happy balance of home and family life with our own little backyard farm, and traveling the world with my whimsical international family (mainly through Asia and Europe on our way to Norway and Ireland where a good portion of our family live). My Dad has his own band, where we sing songs in 20-ish languages, and my brothers and I grew up performing and traveling with the band, adding a little extra song, dance and flavour to our rhythm of life. We also spent a significant amount of our young lives volunteering for all types of local charities, meeting and working with people, learning and appreciating their unique stories and helping them when times were tough. Our lives were constantly spent connecting with new and old friends all over and I learned as a small child how to relate to people at all ages, levels and cultures. We found connection, joy and wonder in everything - in our own backyard and all over the world - I now find myself passing along this same sense of whimsy and wonder to my own children, and also feel that relating with this sense in a rich and colourful way is the foundation of my photographic eye.

As your photographer, you'll find me gravitating towards golden light, capturing the essence I see of your natural beauty, tapping into whatever it is that makes you feel alive and making our ordinary extraordinary! I love connecting and making a difference in your life through my imagery, even if in the smallest way. We'll also find ourselves playing and dancing and loving and laughing 'til our sides hurt!

When I'm not behind the camera creating memories, you'll find me being Mama to my three beautifully clever and free-spirited children,  adventuring all over Los Angeles and beyond with family and friends, promoting steady streams of giggle-fits, playing in the backyard with our animals (we have a little chicken farm!), and still thriving in finding and embracing the whimsy and wonder in everything.

I look forward to connecting with you! Let's make some beautiful stories together. :-)

xxx Laura