Ten years ago, producer/director Peter Chin introduced me to the Nasimuddin family. At the time, it was simply a request to photograph their Raya family portrait.
I did not know then that it would become a decade-long tradition.
Every year, on the first day of Hari Raya, the extended family gathers at the home of Puan Sri Zaleha Ismail. Between greetings, laughter, and the joyful chaos that comes with a house full of relatives, the Stories team arrives with our cameras to capture a moment that has now become part of the family’s annual ritual.
The family includes Puan Sri Zaleha, her children and their families: Datuk SM Faisal, Nur Diana, SM Nasarudin and Marion Caunter, Faliq and Chryseis Tan, as well as Nur Nadia and Hamzah.
It is a big family. And when everyone gathers together in their Raya outfits, the house fills with energy.
In the early years, photographing the children was an adventure in itself. Toddlers rarely sit still for long. I still remember little Liam crawling away from the sofa during one of our sessions while the adults laughed and tried to coax him back.
Fast forward a decade, and those same children now walk into the room with growing confidence and personalities of their own. Some who once needed to be carried now stand tall beside their parents. Along the way, new babies have joined the family, and every year the group grows just a little bigger.
For Marion Caunter, the yearly portrait has become a moment she looks forward to.
“I do photos for a living, but family shots are always the most stressful,” she laughs. “But it’s so fun every year to do them with the kids as they grow older and more babies enter the family. You see the family grow, and it’s just chaos but in a good way.”
One of the highlights of each session is Marion’s now legendary “catwalk moment” with her daughters Leia and Lana. Year after year, they stride toward the camera together, turning a simple walk into a playful tradition. When you watch the images side by side across the years, it becomes a beautiful visual timeline of childhood unfolding.
That is what makes these annual portraits so meaningful.
A single photograph captures a moment. But a series of photographs over time captures a life story.
When we look back through ten years of images, we see children growing taller, cousins forming bonds, and the subtle ways families evolve over time.
For us at Stories, moments like these remind us that photography is about much more than a single photoshoot.
Every family we photograph becomes part of a larger narrative. In that moment behind the camera, we are witnessing a slice of life that will one day become part of a family’s history.
That is also why we take archiving seriously. Over the years, we have invested in terabytes of storage to safeguard the photographs we create. It is our way of protecting these memories so that if families ever lose their copies, those moments can still be recovered. Because photographs are not just images. They are pieces of a family’s legacy.
Looking back at the Nasimuddin family’s portraits over the past decade feels a little like flipping through a living archive of Raya celebrations. Each year tells a slightly different story, but the heart of it remains the same: family gathering, laughter filling the home, and one shared moment in front of the camera before the day unfolds.
For us, it is always a privilege to be invited back again the following year to continue documenting that story.
Ten years later, we are still there. Camera in hand. Witnessing the next chapter.
Here’s a behind-the-scenes snippet from one of the shoots we did! Contact us if you’d like to start your own family legacy of images.
