Welcome to another blog post! It’s been a while since I wrote here - I hadn’t worked on too many projects, or any that I was ready to share, but I’d really like to get back to my blog and share some more! I’ve been working on a few things here and there and thought it might be interesting to catalog my journey with photography. I know this is probably a longer blog post than usual, but I’m using it as an outlet for myself as well, so you’ll have to forgive the lack of brevity.
Essentially, if you know me, you know that I was a wedding and portrait photographer for about 7 years (give or take). I picked up the camera when I was in middle school, and shot my last wedding in January of 2022. And there’s so much before, after, and in between, so let’s dive in together!!
When I picked up photography, it wasn’t necessarily because of what photography was. I was a depressed middle schooler looking for a way to fill some time, and have a creative outlet. At that point in my life, I had stopped writing, after some stressful events in my life, and my creativity felt like it had nowhere to go. I asked my mom if I could borrow her DSLR - it was a Nikon D5200, nice easy starter camera - and I decided to just start going for walks with my best friend at the time. I remember it was winter when we started going on those walks and I would photograph the trees, covered in snow, driveways sparkling, anything and everything. I felt that it took me a while to actually develop what a lot of people call ‘an eye.’
“Wow, you really have an eye for photography!” It’s like telling someone they have the right hand for drawing, haha - all skills are trained and acquired. Being a creative person just helped me along, gave me ideas, and drove me to keep trying new things. I kept taking photos of things into high school - vacations, my friends, more walks around my neighborhood. I’m going to include some photos intermittently in this blog post, so you can see how my photos changed over time. It’s interesting to see how my styles have changed.
My business erupted in high school - I think primarily in my junior year is when things started to really pick up. I shot my first wedding, I believe, at 16. I think my dad drove me and waited in a nearby parking lot while I worked :) Looking back, those photos are… rough. But it was all a learning experience.
By senior year I was photographing everyone I knew, or at least that’s what it felt like. I did senior sessions, family sessions, couples sessions, I even photographed the school marching band, and took headshots for the theater company. I mean this in the least annoying way possible - but I was basically the go to photographer at my school, which basically just meant, I was the idiot trying so hard to grow up and turn it into a business!
Sorry, that was a little too cynical. It was fun for a while. I went on a few vacations in high school where I was really able to capture new, beautiful landscapes and those were incredible. When I graduated high school in 2019, my business was still growing strongly, so I decided that I wouldn’t try to go to college full time, and instead commute in on a different program. I started working at Target that summer and soon found myself working two full time jobs and filling up all my time.
After a lot of intense struggles with my mental illness, I came out of things a little different, and evaluated my business. I found that weddings were beginning to cause me a lot of anxiety - actually, most photoshoots were. The exciting sessions I used to tackle confidently in high school left me feeling nauseous, and lacking confidence. I struggled to pose people in an original way. Weddings were terrifying, because it ultimately came down to me as the photographer to capture every important moment, and keep track of the schedule all day. It was an incredibly stressful job to have and, meanwhile at Target, in August of 2021, I took a promotion to be a manager at a new store. At the time, I was still confident I needed to grow my business so photography could be my full-time job. But the real implications of that frightened me a lot.
On top of those technical aspects, I was beginning to really struggle creatively. I took inspiration from so many talented photographers, but most of my time I would just compare our work. I found that my new ‘ideas’ were just trying to take on a current trend or idea, with my own little spin on it. And there’s nothing wrong with that really, but I felt so stumped that I couldn’t come up with anything original, and kept playing that comparison game with everyone who I considered to be a better photographer. Especially in the era of Tik Tok and Instagram, creative and fantasy photography was absolutely everywhere. I wanted to be a part of it so badly, but it felt like I couldn’t come up with anything on my own to contribute. The reality was, my ideas were waiting under the surface, but I became so convinced my work was terrible, and much worse than anyone else's, that I couldn’t carry out my ideas.
So in January of 2022, I took my last wedding. It was crazy that just months before, I was so sure I wanted to make photography my full time career. In reality, as soon as I sent off the photos for my last gallery, I felt an immense relief. This is it, I thought, I’m finally out. I took down my social media accounts and my website. And for a long time, pretty much at least the whole of 2022 and plenty of 2023, I was done. If you had asked me then (and I’m sure a few of you did) about photography, I would have said I was done with it. Honestly, some people just didn’t understand when I would say that. I think that a lot of people that weren’t close with me didn’t understand why I would just throw that away.
And yeah, that’s fair. There’s been so many times where I wondered if I made the right call. Or I’d see some awesome clips of an amazing photographer living a cool, fun, exciting life and I’d feel a lot of jealousy and heartbreak. I must have made the wrong choice, right?
In reality, leaving my business behind allowed me to focus on my life in a much more natural way. I was able to play around with film photography much more, and got a little point and shoot that was stronger than a disposabale camera. Lots has changed since then - I left Target, I went through some more difficult times with mental illness, but I also had some awesome times, and found a great new job.
Then, around fall of 2023, I started to feel it a little bit again. A little dramatically, I call it ‘the Sight.’ I think a lot of creative people relate to being able to visualize things in your brain. I’ve always been that way, and it’s helped shape my projects and photoshoots. I really stopped photography for a while there. I spent a lot less time on social media, too. And I think as I started to overthink it all less, the ideas came to naturally resurface in my brain. It’s kind of the best, most distracting feeling EVER. Sometimes it was just, let’s go take photos outside! Other times it’s wait, this would make a great collage. And recently, it’s been even better. Like I can see an entire concept in my mind, and spin it around from different angles, and play with the lighting and colors in my brain.
When I said this can be distracting, seriously, it actually feels like when Raven gets a vision in That’s So Raven. Dead serious. And then suddenly I’m in a fury writing down ideas in my whatever notebook I can find, making a horrible sketch, browsing Etsy and Poshmark for just the right piece of clothing I need, figuring out what light I’ll need to take my photos. It’s… exciting.
And basically, in the last few months, it’s come back. That’s what caused me to write this blog post - it feels like I’ve gone full circle again. After ceasing the comparison, trying to overdraw from the infinite well of inspiration, the ideas just showed up on the doorstep again. I’m not saying everything is a winner, but it’s so fresh to want to make these projects again.
So that brings us to now. I have some projects I’m working on, some ideas down the road. I really just want to play. I want to have fun. I want to be less harsh on myself - on how the photos are, or how I look in the photos. All of it.
I’ve found that I still struggle with directing people a lot. It’s easy to take a self portrait because at least I’m the boss of all my movements. I see exactly what I want in my mind, but it’s so hard to translate it, to untangle it, and to explain it. Thankfully I have my beautiful partner Matt who gives me the opportunity to try out different ideas, even if they don’t all pan out.
My goal going forward is to try different things, and remember that this is all art. It’s messy and sometimes fuzzy, sometimes razor sharp and brimming with blood, other times it’s fluttering so fast I cannot catch it in my hands. I need to try and make all that I can, because I don't’ think I know any other way to be. I really think that’s why it came back to me. And I’m ready to change all my ideas into something much more pulsing, colorful, painful, and alive.
Thanks for reading :)