It is no secret that I have a weakness for film photography, so when I came across Zhenya Skiba’s Instagram feed I was immediately captivated. Her images are absolutely stunning and have so much depth to them. Like storytelling all wrapped up in an image she leaves you wanting more. To my surprise she is not a photographer for hire, but a hobbyist. A mom with a passion for documenting her children through photography.

We are so honored to be featuring her work here on Childhood Unplugged today. Because of the fact that Zhenya is from Russia and English is not her native language, it was kind of hard to do a normal question and answering style interview. So I’ve asked her to simply tell us a bit about herself and what her family does to unplug.

“I live in the very beautiful city of Saint-Petersburg, Russia. I am not in any business, because I have three little children, three beautiful girls. They are 6, 3.5, and 1.4 years old.

I am Christian, and God helps a lot to go through all mummies difficulties. I take photos too much, my computer always rebells, but I can’t help myself. I am an accountant as main profession, worked as financial manager, and helped my husband in his business of short-term apartment rentals. But my real passion is drawing, sculpturing, design and photography. I do not have time to do anything of these, except photography, because children are always around, and its impossible to keep camera away – they are so much fun in all their creative games!

We love to travel a lot, and take kids with us. We visited China, Austria (skiing), Turkey, Thailand, Montenegro, and many other countries. Finland is very close to us, we drive there by our car. It takes only two hours.

I love cooking a lot.

Motherhood is a big challenge for me. It’s very hard. With three kids I strive to find time to play with them, cause all time goes on cleaning, preparing, feeding, and driving them somewhere. But I am working on positive thinking now, I believe God want us to rejoice and be happy.

I post pictures and fun stories about my kids in Russian at vk.com/mamaskiba but it is only for registered members. Sometimes I post them in Instagram, trying to translate to English too.

Thank you so much for your interest in my photos!”

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I think it is so absolutely brave to write in a language that is not your native tongue. Thank you Zhenya for sharing a little about yourself and how you unplug with your children. You can follow Zhenya on Instagram @zhenya_skiba